Archive for March, 2011

Ars reviews the Motorola Xoom

Friday, March 18th, 2011

Ars Technica’s in-depth review of the Motorola Xoom tablet includes this nugget:

Getting music onto the device wasn’t as straightforward as I had hoped. Most Android phones have limited internal storage capacity and are built with the assumption that the user will store media on a microSD card. The Xoom, however, has lots of internal storage and, at the present time, no working microSD slot.

This is an issue because Android typically doesn’t allow the user to mount the system’s internal flash memory as a conventional mass storage device. You can’t just plug the Xoom into a USB port to drag and drop your music onto the filesystem.

The Xoom uses the MTP protocol to expose the user-visible parts of the device’s internal storage to a desktop computer. MTP tends to work pretty well-out-of-the-box on Windows, but Mac OS X users will need to install the Android File Transfer program. Unfortunately, no such application is available for Linux users. If you want to access the Xoom’s internal storage through Linux, your best bet is to try mtpfs, a FUSE-based MTP protocol implementation.

And people moan about iTunes…