- video recording: you said that pretty much every Honeycomb is not worthy it. As opposed to...? Is there any good option? I remember seeing a comparison video footage between Xoom, Ipad 2 and I don't remember what else and they look pretty much the same, good enough 720p (unlike the Iconia that indeed seems bad).
Regarding video recording (I'll leave the platform discussion for tomorrow)...
They are all generally crappy with the rolling shutter and a too-small sensor to give any kind of good quality. Calling any of them HD is really a joke. Sure, they have the pixels, but pixel count is
certainly not everything (or even the most important factor). I'd agree that video recording on the iPad vs. Xoom is roughly equal (though in my short time with the Xoom the camera app did manage to crash twice). But, the iPad isn't absolutely perfect in this regard (though crashes are almost always third-party apps, and essentially never take the OS itself down like was all too common with the Xoom).
However, in many cases, the Honeycomb camera implementation seems bad (which follows from what I've experienced with many Android phones, though they finally seem to be getting better in the current shipping generation). From the
AnandTech review of the ASUS:
Image quality is fine for use online but nothing spectacular. Most images captured are reasonably sharp in the foreground but not very detailed in the background. Images can look hazy depending on the lighting conditions. The front facing camera is similarly standard, comparable to the Xoom:
The camera app itself is stock Honeycomb. It takes just under 2 seconds to launch and up to 2.8 seconds to capture an image once you hit the shutter button. Occasionally (even with the latest software update available to me) the camera app will show me a green screen instead of the output from the camera sensor. Reopening the camera app always fixes the issue.
Okay, so that's not great (I just tested and the iPad 2's camera app launches in around a second every time, and then takes pictures as fast as you can hit the button), but the image quality for stills on the Xoom and the Asus are, while not good by any stretch and a far cry from what my phone can do, certainly better than the crappy video frame grab the iPad 2 manages. And the green thing isn't great, but it is early software and should be fine with an update or two. On the other hand... Who really cares? How often are you going to actually use one of these things to take snapshots? Almost never, if you have access to ANY other camera nearby. It is good to have the capability, for app usage mostly, but I wouldn't call the still camera performance or quality a "killer feature" by any means. It'll mostly be useful for things like snapping a shot of a handwritten note or document in Evernote, and stuff like that.
But then there's this:
ASUS has a serious issue when it comes to video recording. For some reason video recorded using the rear camera on the Eee Pad is captured at a much lower than real-time frame rate.
Go look at the video example in the review. It seriously looks like it is generally around 10-15 frames per second, with drops even lower. It's a joke. This is a shipping product?
Video performance, particularly framerate reliability, is something else entirely. You aren't going to go out and shoot a Criterion Collection masterpiece (or even a decent home movie often) on any of these. But, the one thing I've
already used my office's iPad 2 for a few times is Skype. These tablets really make the perfect Skype video chat machines. They're big enough that you can set them on a coffee table (or conference table) with a stand (the magnetic cover thing on the iPad works great), and still see and hear the call great, without all the complexity of setting up a webcam on a HTPC. But then, if you want to pick it up to walk somewhere else (to show the baby's crib for example, or just to walk into the kitchen to grab a beer), you just grab it and walk, which is quite awkward with a laptop. Image quality? Meh... That doesn't matter that much, so long as it is "acceptable". Better would be better, of course, but a solid framerate and lighting performance are more important than pixel count by a long-shot. A video call on a crappy webcam that barely manages 15fps (much less 24p or 30p) is not a good experience.
Hopefully ASUS fixes it, but I suspect it might not be that easy to get right. Among the big Honeycomb tablet reviews I've read, only the Xoom seems to have managed acceptable video framerates. The G-Slate (or whatever they're calling that ridiculous thing), the Acer, and the Asus all seem to have fallen flat on the first go. MANY of the existing Android phones have had similar issues that have never been fixed (like the Droid Incredible and the EVO 4G among others), so I wouldn't be so quick to chalk this one up to "it'll get fixed in software soon".
Is this stuff a huge deal? Absolutely not, but it isn't nothing, and it does indicate a level of attention to detail.
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