6. Entertainment
For many users, the Xoom is an entertainment device for reading books, watching YouTube videos, catching a movie, playing a game, or listening to large libraries of cool tunes. This chapter takes a look at various aspects of entertainment on the Xoom.
Reading Books
Plenty of e-book readers are available for the Xoom, including the popular Amazon Kindle, but the Xoom’s built-in Books app is a great feature that gives you access to plenty of free reading material. In this section, I look at both readers.
Books are available through the cloud, which is to say that the content is downloaded a bit at a time as you read. If you’re going to be away from Internet access for a while, it’s important to make the books you want to read available offline so that you can read them anywhere—and I show you how to do that in this section, too.
To read a book with the Books app
- Touch the Books app’s icon
on the home screen.
Touch Books.The Books app opens
, displaying some of the available free books.
Books greets you with a display of free books.
Touch and hold a book for more info or a menu of options. - Touch the book you want to read.
The book opens.
- Turn pages by touching a page and pulling it from right to left, as shown in
.
Pull from right to left to turn a page, just as you would in a physical book.
To read a book offline in the Books app
- Touch the Books app’s icon
to open the Books app 
. - When you’ve found the book you want to read, do one of the following:
• Touch and hold the book’s icon, and choose Make Available Offline from the pop-up menu
.• Touch the Menu icon in the top-right corner of the screen, and choose Make Available Offline from the drop-down menu
.
Touch Menu to see book options.
To set reader options in the Books app
- Tap the screen anywhere.
The reader controls appear
.
The Books app’s reader controls. - Touch the Text icon
.
A bar of text controls appears at the bottom of the screen.
- Set the changes you want.
To change the font, for example, touch the Typeface menu (open in
) and choose a new font from the pop-up menu.
Choose a new font from the Typeface menu. - When your changes are complete, touch the Done button
.
To read a book with the Kindle app
- If you have the Kindle app installed on your Xoom, touch the app’s icon to launch it.
- Touch and hold the icon of the book you want to read.
A pop-up menu displays start-page options
.
Touch and hold a book’s icon to see this menu. - Touch an option to begin reading at that point.
If you’re reading a book in this app for the first time, a Reading Tips dialog box appears.
- Touch Dismiss
to move on.
Dismiss the dialog box. - To turn pages, touch and hold the page, and then slide it in the direction in which you want to turn
.
Pages slide instead of turn in the Kindle app. - If you want to change the text display, tap the screen to display the reader controls
.
The Kindle app’s reader controls.
.
To annotate text in the Kindle app
- Complete steps 1–3 of “To read a book in the Kindle app” earlier in this chapter.
- Select the text you want to annotate
, and touch Note in the top-right corner of the page.
An onscreen keyboard and blank text box appear.
- Type the note and then touch the Save button
.
Type the note you want to make and then touch Save.A small number appears in the text you selected. The first note you make in a book is 1, the second note you make is 2 (as in
), and so on.
A small number denotes where you placed a note.When you touch a highlighted note number, the note text appears
.
Touch a note number to see what the note says.
Watching YouTube Videos
One part of the Internet that has become synonymous with surfing is YouTube, an online service that allows users to upload (and subsequently view) videos of all kinds. YouTube content includes everything from homemade music videos to hard-hitting news commentary to TV commercials from 40 years ago. There’s a great deal of content on YouTube, and the Xoom has the app to bring you that content.
To play a YouTube video
- Touch and hold an empty area of the home screen, and pull the screen to the right .
Pull the home screen to the right. - Touch the YouTube icon (a stack of video screens) to open the app.
Touch YouTube.A wall of videos opens
.
YouTube initially shows you a wall of videos. - Do one of the following:
• Select a video’s thumbnail
to view that video.• Touch Browse at the top of the screen
to display a list of categories ; touch a category; then touch a video’s thumbnail to play it.
Select a category to browse.The selected video opens in a play window
. Touch the screen to see the play controls.
A video play window.
To play a video full screen, touch the Full Screen icon in the bottom-right corner of the play window . This button is a toggle, so touch it again to turn full-screen display off.
Touch Full Screen to see a video that way.
Playing Music
The Xoom comes with a Music app that can manage all your music on the device. The Xoom can behave much like an iPod, and if that’s the way you intend to use the Xoom, it rises to the occasion admirably.
At this writing, Google has just added Music Beta (which probably will be called Google Music eventually), which allows you to place all your online music in the cloud and then access it anywhere at any time.
Although Google will eventually release a Music Beta app for the Xoom that you can use to play and manage your online music library, for now, you must use the Internet-based interface.
Transferring music from your computer via USB
The best way to transfer music from your computer to your Xoom is to connect the two devices via USB cable and then use Windows Media Player (PC) or Android File Transfer (Mac) to drag music files to your Xoom. The process is explained in Chapter 8 and is very simple.
But this process is only one way to get music on the Xoom, as you see later in this section.
To play music from your Xoom’s music library
- Touch the Music app’s icon on the home screen to open the app.
Touch Music.What you see when the app opens depends on what happened last:
• If you’re opening the app for the first time (which I assume in this exercise), the New and Recent screen opens in Album view
.
Touch an album to select it.• If you’ve used the Music app before, it opens to the last screen you used.
- Touch the album you want to listen to.
You see a list of all the songs from that the album that you have on your Xoom. If you have only two songs from one album, for example, the Music app lists just those two songs for that album.
- Touch the song you want to listen to .
Select a song by touching it.The song begins to play
.
Enjoy your song. The controls are right in front of you now.
Transferring music from your computer via Music Beta
Music Beta is a paradigm-shifting idea that makes all your legally acquired music material from your computer(s) available online, ready for listening on the Internet whenever you want. This section shows you how to sign up for Music Beta and make all your music available online.
By the time you read this book, Music Beta may have a slightly different name, but the process of installing and using the software should be fundamentally the same.
To set up Music Beta on the Xoom
- Touch the Browser app’s icon on the home screen to open the app.
Touch Browser. - Type music.google.com in the URL field at the top of the browser screen.
- Select the program in the search results.
When Music Beta opens, you may get a warning that Adobe Flash isn’t installed on your Xoom
. If so, touch Install the Flash Plugin; follow the onscreen directions to install Flash; and repeat steps 1–3.
Flash installation warning.Otherwise, you see the screen shown in
.
Music Beta’s opening screen. - Enter your Google-account login information, and touch Sign In.
- Proceed to the next section.
To set up Music Beta on a computer
- On your computer, complete steps 1-4 of “To set up Music Beta on the Xoom.”
The welcome page opens
.
Music Beta welcomes you. - Click Next.
The terms-of-service page opens
.
Music Beta’s terms of service. - Touch Agree.
- In the next page, select the genres of music you like, and click Add Free Music .
Choose the types of free music you want. - In the next page, click Download Music Manager , and follow the onscreen instructions to install it.
You must download Music Manager to get music off your computer. - Sign in to Music Manager
, using your Google login information.
Log in to Music Manager here. - In the Select Music page , choose the location of your music library on your computer, and click Continue.
Select the location of your music on your computer. - In the Preparing to Add Music page, click Continue.
Music Manager starts uploading your music to Music Beta
.
Your music starts uploading. - When the upload is complete , select what you want to listen to and then click the Play button in the bottom-left corner of the screen.
Music Beta is ready to go!
Organizing Games
Because games are such a big part of tablet use for most users, it’s a good idea to organize your game software in one panel of your home screen. In this section, I show you how to create a section for all your game apps in one of the five pages of your home screen.
To create a games page
- Touch the plus sign in the top-right corner of the home screen .
Touch the plus sign.The personalization screen opens.
- Select App Shortcuts in the middle of the screen .
Touch App Shortcuts. - In the resulting screen, drag an app’s icon one at a time to the home-screen page where you want it to reside .
Drag a game-app icon to a new location.When you drag the app over the destination screen, the screen zooms in
so that you can place the icon exactly where you want it.
Place the app where you want it. - Repeat step 3 for each app you want to move .
Keep moving game icons.
Although moving apps one at a time may be tedious, there’s no way to move apps en masse, and it’s better to have the control you get when you move apps one at a time.
If necessary, touch the bottom half of the screen and scroll to the right through your app list to find more games you need
.
Scroll to find more game apps. - To finalize the placement of the app icons in your games page, go to that screen, and organize the icons the way you want them .
Do the final organization of your games.Now you have a home-screen page with nothing but games on it
, and you know exactly where to go to release some gaming tension.
Your games page is ready!