Xoom tablet will be sold by Best Buy, Carphone Warehouse and Dixons

MOTOROLA MOBILITY'S Android 3.0 Honeycomb Xoom tablet will go on sale at Best Buy, Carphone Warehouse and Dixons retail outlets in the second quarter.

The 3G and WiFi capable version of the Xoom will be sold by Carphone Warehouse and Best Buy while Dixons, Currys and PC World will have the WiFi only version.

The INQUIRER's intrepid reporters got to examine the tablet at the Consumer Electronics Show in January before it was demonstrated at Mobile World Congress last week.

UK prices aren't available yet but Motorola is already having to defend its US pricing.

"2011 will be the year of the tablet," said Graham Stapleton, chief commercial officer at The Carphone Warehouse and Best Buy. "Demand for tablets has already been greater than expected and the next 12 months will see them being adopted by more and more people as new products are unveiled."

The Xoom tablet has a dual-core processor, which Motorola says has both cores running at 1GHz, the Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system, and it supports Adobe Flash and Air, has a widescreen 10.1-inch HD 720p capable display with 1280x800 resolution, HDMI out, a 5MP rear-facing camera for HD 720p video capture and a 2MP front-facing camera for video calls.

It also has a gyroscope, barometer, e-compass, accelerometer and a battery that Motorola claims supports up to 10 hours of video playback with half the charging time of other tablets on the market. µ