Day Five, Second Picture

For day five, here is another picture taken with the Xoom.

Start of Day Four -- Review of Outside Use.

It certainly is nice to be able to sit outside and access the internet. I realize I am way behind the times in just now finally enjoying that benefit of being untethered. Nice spring weather has finally reached our area, so I picked up the Xoom just in time.

However, I can see the point of the Kindle ads where they focus on the readability of the Kindle's screen outdoors as compared to other devices. I do need to be careful where I sit in relation to the sun. Even in the shade I can still see the reflection of my face on the screen. That's a drawback I can deal with though, so I can foresee spending quite a bit of time on the back porch.

Maybe over time the next door neighbor's dog will get used to seeing me and stop barking. So far the little, yipping critter is more annoying than the screen glare.

Start of Day Three -- Experiments in Public Wi-Fi

Today is the first experiment with finding a wi-fi hotspot over my lunch hour. Results have been mixed, but nothing to do with the Xoom. The first place I tried did not have wi-fi at all. So I changed my mind about where to eat, but the second place turned out to have problems too. After I had already ordered my food and sat down, I discovered they are having some sort of problem with their wi-fi service and the connection is spotty at best.

I'm sure people who have a lot of laptop experience have been there, done that. I got caught a bit off guard though, which can be chalked up to a learning experience.

Start of Day Two -- Review of Onscreen Keyboard.

Busy day yesterday, so there still hasn't been as much chance to use the Xoom as I would like. However, I can report that I seem to be developing a hybrid way of using the on screen keyboard.

The Xoom onscreen keyboard is a slightly compacted version of QWERTY without the punctuation key normally found under the right-hand pinky finger. Between that and the inability to actually rest fingers in the normal home position, I have found myself resorting back to what I used to call "advanced hunt and peck." That is, not using all 10 fingers, but more than just one or two. I do need to look at my hands a bit more regardless since there isn't the physical feedback of touching seperate keys.

Contrary to my post of yesterday, though, it now seems to be reacting the same as my Android phone with regards to automatically capitalizing the letter I and the first letter of a sentence. I did not make any settings changes at all between the two posts, so I am not sure where that change came from.

I am still seriously considering getting the wireless keyboard though. The on screen keyboard takes up a significant chunk of real estate when open, plus there is the fatigue factor. It is nessessary to hold your hands completely up off the screen to prevent accidental touches that cause stray letters to creep in.

First Picture

Yesterday afternoon I did manage to squeeze in a little bit of time to start experimenting with the camera.

One of the very first pictures taken with my Xoom.

Start of Day One

Even though I picked up my new Xoom late yesterday afternoon, I am counting today as "Day One."  I had too much to do yesterday evening to be able to have time to really use the Xoom much.  The fact that I didn't stay up all night last night playing with the new gadget pretty much gives away the fact that I am not an early adopter of bleeding edge technology.

I am neither a tech-head nor a computer illiterate.  Like many other areas of my life, I fall somewhere in the middle.   One of the themes of this blog will be to give a review of the Xoom from that perspective.

So far I have found the Xoom to be fairly intuitive.  Not owning a laptop, I have very little experience dealing with wi-fi but have had no difficulty getting the Xoom to connect to the internet via wi-fi.  Once that was done, navigating to blogger was a simple process -- bring up the browser and type in the url.

The touchscreen keyboard works fairly well.  Unlike with my Android phone, the keys are large enough that I can easily hit the letter I want to hit rather than have the system pick up one of the other letters on either side of the one I wanted.  However there are a couple things I can do texting on my phone that do not seem to be the default on the tablet.  When texting on my phone a single letter "i" gets capitalized automatically and so does the first letter of a sentence.  There may be an option to do that on the Xoom, but I haven't had a chance to look into it yet.

First Post

The theory behind this blog will be to see if a Motorola Xoom is a worthwhile blogging tool.  This is my very first post with a brand new Xoom.   There will be much more to come.