[Xoom General] JanetPanic:
I think it is not so much recreating the wheel so much as trimming down and adapting.

X with gnome/kde is not currently a good fit for a touch screen only device. Even if the window manager could be adapted to work well for touch screen only, interaction with most applications would still be problematic. Getting application developers to go in a common direction is hard enough as is.... and you want to ask all of them to rewrite the apps to work in a touch screen environment? Still if you want to try this route you could get a meego or work in KDE embedded. The effort (as Nokia discovered, and Open Moko before them) is non trivial however.

Android, and by extension Android applications, are designed to work with a touch screen interface from the beginning. It is less work to extend the structure to support larger screens than the adaptation X based applications would have to go through.

Android is not a general purpose computing platform though. It was originally written to work in a cell phone environment, with the attendant limitations and advantages. I think this core concept has not changed with the introduction of the tablet. We are still dealing with a connected device whose primary purpose is the consumption of information. What I mean by this is that android is not meant for creation (such as creation of MS office documents, programming, photoshop, etc...) but consumption (playing games, reading mail, browsing the web, reading MS office documents, etc...)

Where I think Android should be going for the near future is refining and improving the ability to consume information:

- Make web browsing more robust, including html5

- Improve video decoding with better codec and container support.

- Make it easier to read documents on the device.

- improve resolution independence at the API level.

- Improve round trips from desktop to cloud to device and back. Make the device used neutral to the information being consumed. e.g. bookmark and open tab syncing in the browser. better dropbox like functionality for availability of files that have been worked on.

Where I want to see it going in the long run can be seen in a nascent form with the Atrix and the Lenovo U1:

- Based upon available resources (keyboard, mouse, monitor) shift from a touch screen interface to a conventional desktop interface. (extend what the Atrix does)

- Make it easy to extend the functionality of the core device by connecting it to resources. (extending the idea behind the Asus Transformer)

- In a perfect world I would like to see a full desktop OS run when requested and be able to use external CPUs (think Lenovo U1). In essence I would like the device to be able to be a boot disk for the user, connect it do a desktop for raw power, connect it to a laptop base for on the go functionality, and use just the phone/tablet for ubiquitous computing. This dream is still a few years from being practical though.

- Make the android OS an installable and user upgradeable OS just as desktop OSes are now. This is even further out but I can see a future where mobile device hardware and OS are separate. This might never come to fruition though due to the way carriers control the phone experience.

And tangentially we could see the Android platform espouse device centric ideals as seen in Japan currently.

- Use the phone as a payment system.

- Augment magazines and stores with tags to feed the phone contextual information.

To be honest I have not given it much thought. I am interested to see where Google is going with the platform however.