Motorola Xoom review

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Many phone manufacturers have been keen to get into the tablet market after the success of the iPad and most have opted to use Google Android as their OS. Until now Google had insisted that the OS wasn’t designed for this purpose and was meant merely for smartphones. Because of a spate of Android tablets being released at the end of last year, most notably the Samsung Galaxy Tab, Google decided that the smartphone OS needed a revamp to make it more suitable for tablets.

Android 3.0 Honeycomb is what they have come up with. This latest version of Android has been specifically designed for tablet use, with an interface fit for purpose. Some noticeable changes include a new design for Gmail and support for video chat. This update could be the much needed impetus that will boost interest in Android tablets and draw attention away from the iPad, which still remains the market leader, and its successor which is to be released in the coming months.

Honeycomb Android requires dual-core processors to run efficiently and the Motorola Xoom is one of the first tablets to be released with a Tegra 2 dual-core processor. This runs twice as fast as the current 1GHz standard and will make Honeycomb tablets the most powerful tablets to date. The Xoom also has 1GB RAM so it will be able to handle pretty much any task thrown at it. While Honeycomb has been designed with tablet use in mind it is still expected to be used with smartphones and so there should be plenty of Tegra 2 powered Android smartphones released in the coming year.

Motorola has opted for a larger tablet with their first offering, and the Xoom comes with a 10.1″ screen which is more ideally suited for multimedia purposes than smaller devices such as the Galaxy Tab. This can be clearly felt when viewing videos, with the Xoom supporting 720p HD videos out of the box. The interface is very sharp with a high resolution of 1280 x 800 and 150p per inch. This screen is capacitive so there are plenty of multi-touch features such as pinch-to-zoom and also a new “floating finger” interface.

While the Xoom itself can playback 720p videos you can output 1080p videos directly to your TV via the HDMI port. This can be a great feature to have if you have lots of people around and you want to view a video contained on your tablet, but there are too many people to crowd around the device. The Xoom comes with 2 cameras, a 5 megapixel rear facing camera with LED flash and HD video recording, and a secondary front facing camera which, as we know with the latest Android update, can be used for video calling.

One of the best features of the Motorola Xoom that is not likely to be present on other tablets released in the coming months is its support for 4G data connections. This support is likely to provide the Xoom with a much longer lifespan than non-4G competitors, with 4G networks likely to become commonplace in the next couple of years. The Motorola Xoom already has one up on earlier Android tablets by having a suitable OS on board, and when considering some of the many hardware features it has under its belt can probably be considered as the first device belonging to the second generation of tablets, despite this being Motorola’s first offering. There is some speculation that it may even outperform the iPad 2, which has yet to be officially unveiled.

Motorola Xoom official video

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