The transformer may not be issue free. But, no matter how you cut it, the Xoom has been botched from the start by Motorola. Especially when you factor in the delay in upgrading the device.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk
Botched?
Hardly.
You see, I bought my Xoom back in Feb so that I could use it for mobile computing. It's done an outstanding job of that for me.
While the Moto/VZ/Google struggled to get their collective act together to deliver such things as SD card (read) access and LTE, these were but "perks" to me. My Xoom has been getting the job done all along, and has proven to be a great investment for me (even @ $600/2-yr contract, and $35/mo - 3GB). Month after month I use up most of 3Gb, and likely a lot more data when I'm on WiFi. I use it several hours in any given day, with a significant portion of that time getting actual work done on it.
Had it never got SD access nor LTE, I'd still be getting great amounts of usage/work out of it.
I rather suspect that a lot of people who imagine themselves "early adapters" really had little idea of how they would utilize a tablet, but wanted to be out-front of the techno-curve.
I already had a very good Idea of how I was going to be using mine, having been through variety of device trying to figure out what was going to best serve me in my mobile computing needs. Prior to getting my oh-so functional Xoom, the best "fit" I'd found was my Droid X phone. It had usable apps (Documents to Go) and true mobile access (3G) that allowed me to take advantage of cloud computing (Google Docs, DropBox, etc.) to access and edit work product, and enter test result data as I moved from lab to lab, and to take notes and create diagrams. It even lets me hook directly into our conference room HDMI TV's with an inexpensive (if you get them through Amazon) cable, and give presentations (all without the previous need to check out AV equipment, nor worry about connectivity issues). The Xoom offers the same, with a more usable screen size.
It was actually more functional, over-all, that the tablet PC that I had leased for a time to test (and a whole lot less expensive in the long-run).
Needless to say, I am extremely happy with my Xoom. Sure, I'd like even more, and I will undoubtedly be buying an upgrade in the future (I'm holding out for larger screen size, higher res, more memory and, hopefully, greater USB host functionality. These seem not to be unreasonable expectations for subsequent generations of tablets, but as the improvements thus far are essentially "marginal", I'm perfectly happy to keep using my Xoom, even though it has fallen well off the techno-lead. I don't even mind if I end up skipping a whole generation or two of tablets in order to wait for the one I really want.
My Xoom isn't meant to impress people (the way I see a significant number of people using (under-) using their iPads), nor to make me look like some sort of leading-edge technophile. It's to help me get lots of real work done.