The Xoom is DEAD, FINISHED, OVER!

Good grief people give it a rest!

I remember back in 2001 when everyone told me I was "nuts" for switching off of Windows and going to the new Mac OS. "Apple is going out of business", they proclaimed. Lord knows how many stories and retweets I saw that today that said something to the affect of "Only 100,000 Xooms sold" Smug iPad owners gleefully asking for retractions on "Xoom is iPads serious competition" stories. My, my, my how short our memories are. Need an example: Top 5 reason the iPad will Fail - Jan 2010 Hell, it was only a year or so ago when the iPad came out and people mocked it was nothing more than a giant iPhone. In fact... it was just a bigger iPhone and that is the difference.

To Apples credit when the iPad came out it ran, for the most part, flawlessly on iOS. Why? Apple had the foresight to know they were going to roll out a product on a larger display that would need new options and screen sizing that was over and beyond what an iPhone could do. So when the iPad was actually deployed it was relatively easy for developers to recode their apps and push it to the new device. OS already debugged and tested. Done!

Enter Honeycomb. Unfortunately, the fact is all other Android tablets before the Xoom were literally phone apps running on a bigger screen. Android 2.x is a phone OS that runs over 90% of the Android devices out there but, has no "real" tablet support in it. Googles answer to the missing tablet OS? Honeycomb - Android 3.0. The first victim? The Xoom. The Xoom and Honeycomb released days apart and that was not a good idea in my opinion. I say "victim" because I would bet money that even Google knows they released the OS way too early. As of today everyone is still waiting on my SD card functionality, and I am sure Google knows it was a oversight not having more applications ready for the tablet. If Google does not think it was a mistake I am sure Motorola does.

Does it matter as a Xoom owner? NO. Not really. I mean sure if I owned Moto or Google stock I might be kind of pissed off right now but as a user? No. The difference between the iOS and the Honeycomb is simple. Xoom is not the only Android tablet in the pipe. LG, Samsung, and countless other are rolling out their own "Honeycomb tablet" and EVERY SINGLE APPLICATION made for any one of those tablets will run on your Xoom. As an added bonus, if Google treats the Xoom like they handle the first Android phone to market (Nexus One) You can expect to see OS upgrades for the Xoom available before any other device sees them.

As for the haters let them hate. No OS upgrades to the iPad are going to give them: USB connectivity, an SD card, full HDMI mirroring that at does not require a special $40 cable, Flash, 1080p, widescreen, or a higher resolution than the Xoom.

Does the latest version of the phone OS work on the very first Android phone? Yes, it does! Two years down the road I bet we will be loading the latest greatest Android Tablet OS on our Xooms with 20,000+ apps available in the Android Market wondering if we should get that new Quad Core Xoom.