Much to my own surprise, after about an hour wait, I actually made in to the Engadget reader meetup in San Francisco this evening. Even more surprising, was that the non-food-related lines weren't all that long, so I got to fondle some gadgets. In particular, I spent a lot of time in the Motorola booth, playing with the Xoom:

Motorola Xoom @ Engadget Reader Meetup SF from Andrew Reitz on Vimeo.

This isn't me driving, but you do hear my voice, answering questions about it (my voice sounds really weird on video). This actual Xoom unit didn't have any Internet access, and all sorts of apps were failing in weird ways due to the lack of Internet. Before I shot this video, I actually attached this Xoom to my MiFi (which fortunately, I had in my pocket), which got the thing online.

Overall, the performance of the Motorola Xoom seemed to be pretty good. So it looks like NVIDIA has a real winner on their hands, with the Tegra 2. But in my short time playing with Android 3.0 (a.k.a. Honeycomb), I found the interface to be fairly confusing. I did a poor job at the beginning of the video, which means that unfortunately I missed showing the weird corner gesture, that only appears to be available in the browser. When I started with the browser, the URL bar was hidden, and you had to do some weird hold-and-tap in the corner, to bring up a quarter-circle of buttons, which allowed un-hiding the URL bar.

It's weird stuff like that, which made Honeycomb hard to deal with in a quick hands-on. I'm sure you can get used to it with practice, but it just didn't feel as \"obvious\" compared with the iPad.

However, I am really glad that I attended the Engadget event. It way exceeded my expectations, and I was pretty close to winning a free phone in the raffle. More photos on Flickr.

-Andy.