Since I do not have a Wifi Xoom myself I have recruited some help. I think you will like him. He is smart, funny, and I made him hack his Xoom and write about it before letting him aboard . You have to have a few standards right? I had to find a person with a Wifi device that had tried and tested anything Wifi related on this website as my goal is to keep this site as accurate as possible. He is also a bit more verbose than I am so I hope you WiFi'er like to read

Please look for post from our resident WiFi'er soon - he goes by the alias of ATP so please lets all give him a warm Welcome!

I keep seeing a lot of folks out there complaining/whining that the Xoom is "expensive" and "overpriced" when compared to an iPad. Really? Are you comparing Apples to Xooms here?

Amazon has the Xoom Android Tablet (Wi-Fi) version for $589 the iPad that is nearest to the Xoom in features is an Apple iPad2 (32GB, Wifi) version for $589 it looks to me to be about the same price!

Now if you buy an iPad 2 today sure you get all the applications available but you also get all of the following:
I do not hate the iPad and if you want all the apps today please buy one but, Apples to Apples the Xoom is about the same price. Some might argue actually cheaper than the iPad given the features. Would it have been nice is Motorola made a 16GB WiFi only version for $499? Yes, but they didn't.

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.

Kudos to author BoostHungry for his hard work on this

Okay so I spent hours playing with different options for ripping blu-rays into a format that could be transferred to my Xoom and I would like to share what I have learned.


The Rippers
I started with some research and downloaded six or seven different programs designed for ripping blu-rays that were recommended some where on the web.

I almost immediately discarded all but three rippers. Two were immediately ruled out after just examining the UI and noticing the lack of customization options. Another three were ruled out based on the fact they required a separate program called AnyDVD to run at all. This didn't bother me too much but further investigation found that AnyDVD costs $60+ in itself and does not offer the most user friendly experience.

It's also worth noting I did not try out the beta of DVD Catalyst because it also requires AnyDVD or a similar program running in unison both of which would be added cost and added hassle. If your only looking to rip DVDs then DVD Catalyst for only $10 is the way to go from what I hear.

What I ended up with were three blu-ray ripping trials.
DVDFab 8 - $60
Pavtube Blu-Ray Ripper - $50
Foxreal Blu-Ray Ripper - $50
(I don't know about the others but Pavtube requires you to spend an extra $5 for them to store your product key in their databases for a year for your convenience...)

At first glance Pavtube and Foxreal seemed almost identical in UI but they performed very different.


Customization
DVDFab was the first ripper I tried and I was very disappointed with the lack of control when ripping the blu-rays. There were nine different profiles to choose from when selecting .mp4 output format. Five of which had either 'ipad' or 'iphone' in the name and had very low max resolution outputs. In the end the only profile that was workable was the basic profile for h264 and for some reason did not support 1920x1080 resolution.

Pavtube and Foxreal had, like I mentioned, identical UIs and actually shared identical customization options. In addition to having many more built in profiles for everything from different Android phones and IPhones to gaming consoles and even power points, it also had basic profiles for common video formats.

Where both Pavtube and Foxreal set themselves apart from DVDFab was in the customization of these profiles. While DVDFab attempted to give me control of resolution, frame rate, bit rate, and audio, Pavtube and Foxreal actually allowed me to change these to an assortment of options including 1920x1080 at multiple frame rates.


Testing
In order to get a good base line of these programs I popped in Avatar on blu-ray into my blu-ray rom and selected a chapter to use as testing so I didn't need to rip the entire movie every time.

From here on you will see me post settings in the form:
Codec: [codec used, file type always .mp4]
Resolution: [resolution]
Bit Rate: [bit rate]
Size: [file size generated]
Speed: [time it took to rip, in minutes]

In DVDFab I was only able to make one good base test due to the lack of customization. I set the settings to:
Codec: h264
Resolution: 1680x946
Bit Rate: 5000
Size: 130mb
Speed: 9:33

This test led me to believe that DVDFab was a possibility because the picture looked phenomenal with good 3d depth and very little artifacting around moving objects. The problem was that it was laggy. It took 10-15 seconds for what appeared to be buffering before the clip would smooth out and then I would get bullet lag quiet often.

I was confident this would be improved if I played with the settings but found that quality had to really be reduced in order for the clip to smooth out.

DVDFab was essentially ruled out.

I then put together some test batches for both Pavtube and Foxreal. I chose to go with four different profiles for each program. h264 with HD standards, h264 base standards, MPEG 4 (xvid) with HD standards, and MPEG 4 (xvid) with base standards. These were the final settings and results:

Note: The chapter I chose was 3:34 long and my computer is using an Nvidia GTX 570 paired with an Intel E6750 2.66GHz dual core processor. You can use this information to judge the speed it took to rip these files. CUDA acceleration was on for all but the first video, CUDA is an Nvidia technology that speeds up the encoding and decoding of h264 files which is the reason the h264 files were significantly faster than the xvid files.

PavTube
4 files

FoxReal
4 files
As you can see the file sizes and speeds were almost identical between Foxreal and Pavtube. Except of course for the first one where I forgot to turn CUDA acceleration on for the ripping.


Quality
Now here is where it got difficult. I know right off the bat people would ask me why I even tried the xvid codecs and instead just accepted that h264 would be the better codec. But I actually found the quality of the xvid looked better than the h264. After watching these clips over and over again both on the Xoom and hooked up to my HD TV, I settled on either the h264 with the HD standard and the xvid with the base line standards. Don't ask me why these two because I couldn't tell ya.

I like to think I have a pretty good eye for video quality, I currently sell HD TVs and can see the difference between 100k contrast and 120k contrast if that gives me any sort of justification.

I eventually agreed (with my girlfriend who was helping me judge) that the MPEG 4 with the xvid codec ripped by Pavtube was the best quality of the bunch. The colors were much more vibrant on my 42 inch plasma while the edges of moving objects were not blurred at all.


Results
What was important to me:
What was not important to me:
After reviewing every aspect of these programs that was important to me I can honestly say that Pavtube gave the best quality and also the best user experience. The reason it beat out Foxreal is the fact that Foxreal would convert some of my videos (the ones with the HD standards) to a 4:3 aspect ratio and also four tests made by Foxreal failed to load on the Xoom while only one Pavtube test failed to load.

So I will now begin ripping my entire blu-ray collection into MPEG 4 formats at 12000 bit rate. But note at these settings your probably looking at 10GBs per movie so these settings are for people who share what is and isn't important for me. Even if this is not what your looking for I would still recommend Pavtube as the ripper of choice but instead of the xvid codec at 12000 bit rate I would go with the h264 codec at 9000 bit rate because you won't sacrifice clarity, just color.


Tips
If you are looking to test video quality for yourself look for a chapter when under Title Mode (on the Pavtube UI) that is rather short but has a good display of colorful moving objects and rip that chapter into different formats and settings.

When ripping the full movie switch the UI to File Mode and rip only the main file. The reason I recommend switching to File Mode is because if you rip both the title and all the chapters under Title Mode it will actually rip the movie twice. If you read my previous edits you will have seen how this doubled my file size.

Remember that movie frame rates are usually around 24fps for a reason. I recommend matching the source when it comes to framerate.

Encode the audio in stereo format. 5.1 audio does not work on the Xoom and it will cause the video to play in fast forward.



Epilogue
I need to note that I'm in no way affiliated with any of the above programs and did this testing because I couldn't find any reviews that were not sponsored by the programs themselves.

I'm entirely new to compression and ripping so this was a learning experience for me and hope that my terminology and assumptions of how the process works is accurate.

As a CS major I'm looking to get familiar with technical writing and I hope this review was readable, informative, and to the point.

Everything above is simply my opinions based on the time I spent with these programs.

-- BoostHungry

In an effort to make my life easier and remotely publish while out and about the heart of my News Blog will exist on BlogSpot.com AKA Google. Why do you have to do or change? Hopefully nothing but I have a feeling all my links are going to get hosed. Wish me luck!

Edit: Woot it worked!

I had a freshly charged Xoom yesterday afternoon and was pretty sure I should have A LOT more battery left than I woke up to. Now as you can see I was playing Angry Birds Rio for a while and if that was my TOP battery use, after the display, I would have totally understood. After thinking about it I realized I had installed the WeatherBug Beta and had set it to use My Location and GPS. Making those calls out every 15 minutes for the Widget and trying to find My Location inside drove the Android OS and the Maps programs.

Battery suckers are always Display, Widgets (Android OS), Games, Maps and usually in that order. As I have said before if you are looking to stretch your battery life dim your display, keep the Widgets to a minimum and don’t run anti-virus applications.

Note: If you are wondering how to see what program is using what percentage of battery and data it is in Settings > Applications > Battery Use. If you click the Application it will show you how much Time and Data it has used and you can also Force Stop it.

Overclocking CPU use

The first thing I wanted to talk about is Profiles and processor speed. Like I told you earlier, before loading the over-clocked kernel, I have NO profiles set up on my Xoom. My Xoom acts just like my Android phone. The only time the tablet spends at the TOP CPU speed is when it needs it. So in my opinion locking the CPU to one speed when the screen is off or when it is on the charger is kind of a waste of time unless you have a specific reason to. I will give you one example when you might want to do this. Let’s say you have your Xoom over-clocked and are using it as a navigation device in your vehicle. Now since the map program is going to be running all the time, the screen is never going to go off, and you will have it plugged all the time. It would make sense to have a “Charging/Full” profile that cuts the CPU down to say 900Mhz to try and keep the heat down. Otherwise don’t try to “out think” your devices CPU needs.

Battery Life

As you see my over-clocked Xoom still can last a good bit of time. Granted I was pretty busy over the last few days and did not get to use my Xoom as much as I would have liked to but one thing I did observe, and some others have confirmed, is that if you have Maps running and the Google Latitude layer on, you will burn CPU. A simple fix for thins is just to turn OFF the GPS while you are inside. If you are looking to get the most battery life out of your Xoom, just like your Android phone, manually control the screen brightness down to as low as you can stand it as nothing uses more battery than your screen. There are a few widgets out there that can help you make this a bit easier. Other things that will help with battery life is not running every single widget available for all you programs and not having them update every 5 minutes. The last thing I do is switch the tablet in to Airplane mode before I go to bed or leaving the house for an extended period of time. This will keep it from doing updates all night while you are asleep or away. Again there are widgets out there that can make this task a simple thing (one button and done).

As you may know your Xoom supports the WebM video format. This is the HTML5 solution for video encodes to replace H.264. I sure it has more to do with licensing more than it has to do with H.264 being “bad” but that is another story.

Anyway, during my initial baseline test (using a 1080p source file out of Final Cut) I was impressed on how the encoder did making a very nice looking MP4 file using the iPad quick pick. The program I used to encode was the Miro Video converter.


And initially I was surprised to see how much smaller the WebM encode was.



Then I looked at it. :( The encoder mashed it down to a 4:3 aspect ratio and it was a bit “skippy” looking. I guess I will have to figure out how to get FFMPEG with the WebM libraries going if I want to get the right aspect ratio on WebM. I pinged the company about this issue as I do not see any setting in the version I have to force things one way or another.

If you are bored and want to play around with WebM or want a good free MP4 encoder you might want to download Miro. Part II

Part II

The FireFox video encoder FireFogg

There is a free encoder that is a FF plug-in that will export WebM and while it looks great in Chrome, yet it skips around when copied to my Xoom. Lots of options and it retains the 16:9 aspect ratio. I see some potential here but would like a standalone application.

Please play with both of these and let me know your findings!

While it is true that the Xoom was rooted the first day it was out it was then over-clocked shortly after that I have yet to see a lot of full system ROMs, a nandroid backup utility (think of it as a ghost image of your tablet), a screen shot application or a plethora of other apps that I kind of "expect" coming from the Droid Community. While hunting around for hacks it turns out that many of the popular Devs are waiting for the SD card to be enabled before they put a lot of effort in to it. One of the beauties of the Xoom, and many other Android devices, is you can take these "backups" from device to device via the SD card.

I also got in to an interesting discussion the other day on Twitter while talking the iPad vs. the Xoom and during the conversation I was reminded of what it was like when I first got my Mac in 2001. There were almost NO applications for it other than the few provided by Apple (OSX was brand new and old OS 9 applications on ran under an emulator) so I seriously considered going back to Windows. Boy, I am glad I didn't! I do wish I had bought a lot of Apple stock back then though :(

So anyway... what is the point of this post? Fear not! The apps are coming. I had faith then and I have faith now. The Xoom has the "hands down" best hardware and potential of anything out there today. Keep the faith.

For the ladies, and men for that matter, drooling over that actor/model in the Xoom commercial. His name is Victor Ross and if you want more of his manly goodness you can check him out here. If you are like me and just wondering what game he is playing it is called Vendetta and should be out shortly for the Xoom. They should have put in the word #Droid in the ad IMO.