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Motorola Xoom hands-on review
THE INQUIRER tested out Motorola's Xoom tablet, its effort to rival Apple's Ipad 2, at The Gadget Show in Birmingham yesterday and we think it's got a good chance of doing well and challenging Apple's dominance in the tablet market.
The Xoom is one of the first tablets to run Google's Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system that is designed specifically for tablets. Google has done well adapting Android from smartphones to tablets and the operating system is a good balance between familiarity and new features.
The hardware, which includes Nvidia's 1GHz Tegra 2 dual core processor and 1GB of RAM, means that it definitely rivals the Ipad 2 in performance. The tablet is extremely responsive and coped well with everything we threw at it.
The same five home screens are present just as you find on Android smartphones but this time the screens rotate on a three dimensional carousel.
A touch button brings up a side menu of the five most recent running apps, so you can switch between different ones easily. We found that the tablet could perform these application switches with no problem.
The 5MP rear camera takes reasonably good pictures but holding a 10-inch tablet isn't ideal for taking photos.
The 10.1-inch screen has good brightness and resolution, so viewing video, playing games and just generally using the tablet is a nice experience. Unfortunately there was no Internet access at the show so we couldn't test out the tablet's web browser.
Motorola has done a good job in designing the Xoom, which looks and feels well built but is slightly on the heavy side at 730g.
The Xoom tablet's design is somewhat minimalist so there is just a volume button on the edge and a power button that is unorthodoxly on the rear, but this is a nice variation from the traditional top corner button on the front. It does have square edges, which means that it isn't quite as nice to hold as the Ipad 2 with its rounded edge. µ
Tags: Hardware
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Sure, they "launched" this at a computer show a few months ago. Probably then they had a couple models of it made from polystyrene or wood. Yes, wood. The software wasn't ready (I see some say it still isn't) and they hadn't even bought the parts it was made from. Now it's here, you can tell that the cigarette lighter doesn't work and is only useful for melting ice in a frozen lock. Useful in Siberia, I suppose. But smokers who pre-ordered will be disappointed.
And if Engadget or whoever reviewed this product yesterday, it's quite likely that the unit that The Register is looking at is the very same one that Engadget got to use, with their fingerprints still on its screen.
By the way, I was joking about the cigarette lighter. It works just fine. Only not in Flight Mode, obviously.
Pity....i've notice lately that TheInq just reposts what TheEngadget already the reported a day ago.
Even worse, as to the XOOM, I have already seen it in Best Buy almost a month ago here in US. UK is probably too far like my Siberia so the delay. Still TheInq is making a "review" of it while there were three major world electronics show since January where Xoom was discussed in each and every small detail. How about making a review of one year old EVO 4G ?
I'd run the contest nowfor the new name for TheInq site. My entry is here: The-All-Gonduras-Review-Of-Dumb-Gadgets-And-Computers dot crp.
@reh: " It's grainy, washed out, and even at maximum brightness, everything looks like you're playing Doom"
Agree about grainy, i do not know about too low brightness, since the BestBuy is always dark insite. While Xoom has 1/3 more pixels then iPad it still is NOT suitable for browsing, for which 3-4 times more pixels needed given the 10" optimal distance for viewing which is the same as for cellphones or books or tablets.
But I'd refrain from kicking Xoom too much, because this is their first gen tablet. At least 720p screen is suitable for movies unlike second gen iPad which is total !@#$#$%^% dot crp. (I agree withthe comments, that probably Steve Jobs was too sick last year and his comrades without him are nobody, sorry, nothing personal. I wholeheartedly wish him all the best with his fight for the health, the computer/electronics will as boring without him as this site, also nothing personal, without Mike Magee)
I tried the ipad 2, its just like the first one with a crappy camera. I became bored with it quickly, anyway I decided to return it in exchange for the xoom. I have had the xoom for about a week, find it very difficult to put it down, it has worked flawlessly. I have read that people have had some issues, but the first ipad wasn't perfect either, I had a wifi only model last year, I wasn't able to use the browser half the time, because they were having problems with the wifi, and that lasted about a month. The wifi xoom comes with built in gps, the wifi ipad has no gps, no flash player, I don't care that they have thousands of apps didn't use them after a couple of weeks anyway.
I think a lot of people are more interested in the eee tab transformer. Regardless of whether you want the keyboard add-on, it's supposed to be cheaper than the xoom and have a much better screen.
I don't expect any of the first generation android tablets to come close to outselling the ipad2. I expect a year or two minimum before anyone else's tablet comes close to the same sales.
it has 32GB of Flash memory (basically disk in PC terms). RAM memory is limited to 1GB, and the ARM Cortex A9 in the Tegra 2 can't address more than 4GB (2^32 bytes).
Please do your work it has 32 gig ram.
Xoom has been the only Honeycomb tablet available in the world for the past month (actually only available in the U.S.) yet it has sold only 100,000 so far.
Compare to iPad 2 which has sold millions in far less time.
I found the article interesting and informative, if not lacking in detail. After reading it and going over to the Motorola Xoom Owners Forum it is clear that the Xoom has some outstanding software issues that should be addressed as soon as possible. In my opinion these are potential killers for this product because it shouldn't have been released in what would appear to be 'beta' clothing. Specifically, there is still no support for the SD Card expansion. There also seems to be a mysterious memory leak which drives the software into overdrive until the Xoom states there is no space left available. I think these points, there may be others that I am not aware of yet, should have been highlighted in the article for potential buyers of the Xoom in the UK. It is true that Motorola have said fixes are on the way, just not when...
"The 10.1-inch screen has good brightness and resolution"
No it doesn't. Unless the one I'm using at work is horribly defective, the thing has just about the worst screen I've seen on a handheld device. It's grainy, washed out, and even at maximum brightness, everything looks like you're playing Doom (forget the default automatic brightness mode; you need to crank it up to maximum to make it halfway useable).