Motorola Xoom

A Honeycomb star, the 10.1 inch Motorola Xoom tablet was the first product to showcase Android 3.0 to the general consumer. Launched before the iPad 2 in the United States, the Xoom has taken its time to ship on this side of the Atlantic.
Inside, you'll find the standard for all Honeycomb tablets released or announced up until now: a dual-core NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor clocked at 1 GHz, 1 GB of RAM, a 1280x800 pixel screen, a 32 GB memory capacity, a micro SD slot to increase the memory by an additional 32 GB, a micro USB and micro HDMI out.

Design & Handling

In spite of weighing 730 grammes, the Xoom is sufficiently well balanced to be held in one hand without straining your wrist. This is an important factor when it comes to how heavy it feels in comparison to the Acer Iconia Tab A500, for example, or the Hannspree SN10T, which aren't a lot heavier.
Note that while the the finish is very elegant and quite successful, under the cover for the SIM/micro SD slot there are two rather slapdash notches leaving the circuit board visible to the eye. This is a detail but it does spoil the overall classiness of the tablet.


The ON/OFF button is placed on the back of the tablet, near to the photo-video sensor. This perhaps wasn't Motorola's best idea. Sure, it's very accessible for the left hand when you pick the Xoom up but otherwise it does seem a bit of a strange place to have put it.


When you're using the tablet on a table for example, you have to pick it it up to get it out of standby mode. This quickly gets tiring, especially as the Xoom weighs 730 grammes.
Another poor design idea, the 3.5 mm jack is in the middle of the upper part of the screen when in landscape mode. Obviously this isn't very practical if you're trying to watch a video as the headphones wire often falls down over the screen!

As discussed in the inset, the microSD slot still isn't functioning.

Screen

While Apple managed to bag most of the available IPS panels for the iPad 2, it looks as if Motorola has also found a good source for its 10.1 inch IPS panels. The Xoom however only offers a contrast ratio of 594: 1, which is far from what you get with an iPad 2 or an Optimus Pad and worse even than the Archos 101 IT. To recap, the best contrast ratio we've measured on a tablet up until now is 1126:1, taken for the Acer Iconia Tab A500.

Moving on to colour accuracy, it looks as if Motorola didn't bother to check its screen particularly thoroughly before release. The Xoom scored a DeltaE of 10.4, which is pretty poor. The red and cyan are around 4, while the rest are off the scale. The image is rather cold, tending towards blue in the dark tones.
Generally, the image is a good deal too dark, which, coupled with very high maximum brightness (one of the highest we've seen on tablets), can give an impression of very high contrast. Of course this will tire your eyes and run the battery down!

At least the IPS technology on this Xoom panel gives very wide viewing angles, which means it never suffers from significant loss in contrast, whatever the angle of the tablet.

Interface and navigation

With nothing more than Android 3.0 in its raw state here, it's difficult to say anything on the OS that hasn't been said already except to repeat that Honeycomb still lacks content capable of matching up to the dynamism and graphics potential (in terms of handling of flow and connected applications) put into place by Google.
The internal navigation is fluid overall but not as fluid as on the Acer Iconia Tab. What's more, the Iconia Tab seems much more at ease when flipping the display between landscape and portrait. The Xoom sticks a little more than the Optimus Pad and the Iconia Tab.


The Xoom keyboard is on a par with what you find on the Optimus Pad and Iconia Tab, namely a large panel of well spaced keys. With the faultless responsiveness of a multitouch screen (10 points), it makes for a high performance entry tool. One day we hope to see alphanumeric keys on the same panel as the letters. After all, this is a 10.1 inch screen.

Multimedia

When the Xoom came out in the United States, Flash compatibility had been removed to provide for improved Flash 10.2 support, which was taking its time to come on stream. The Xoom now has Flash on the Internet browser with almost full compatibility.
Some windows are still somewhat recalcitrant however and there are sometimes slowdowns in the loading of pages with a lot of Flash. Apart from this, Internet browsing remains fluid and the thumbnail system put into place on this Honeycomb device is a real joy to use.
The resolution means you can read all the screen content no problem in both positions, portrait or landscape. The zoom is rapid and precise and scrolling is smooth with few slowdowns.


In the absence of a dedicated Motorola media player, video playback is subject to native Honeycomb compatibility, namely support for MPEG4 / H.264 files in AVI or MKV containers and up to 1080p Base Profile (best to remain at highly encoded 720p). For the rest of your virtual video library, you'll need a third party application.


The music player, revisited graphically (a 3D carousel) supports mp3s and WMV with a third party application required again for other files.

The main 5 Megapixel photo sensor is effective and compares very well with the sensor on the LG Optimus Pad or the Acer Iconia Tab A500. We won't even talk about the iPad 2! The colours are quite accurate, the focus rapid and the flash doesn't turn into a flare. Motorola has obviously sourced this part of its tablet well.



Moving on to audio, listening with headphones gives a clean sound with no parasites. You get plenty of power. We're less convinced about the speaker however. While the sound is very satisfying, you have to turn the tablet over to get the best out of it. Near to the ON/OFF button and the photo sensor, the speaker is adversely affected when you turn your Xoom back the right way.
You'll also sometimes find yourself putting your fingers over the speaker, or too close to it. In video mode, you don't hear much and this is a shame. The speaker, like the ON/OFF button, was almost a good idea but doesn't really work in the end.

Battery life

Battery life is very good on this device, with a full battery lasting between 8H and a little over 9H30. Motorola manage this by using two 3250 mAh batteries (only one is used on the Acer Iconia Tab A500). In mixed usage, with Internet, some gaming, typing, a good few mails and a few episodes from your favourite serial, it'll easily give you over 8H30. When you do a lot of gaming however, particularly in the latest games that give free rein to the Tegra 2, the Xoom starts to sweat a bit and will give up the ghost after 8H.
With video too, the tablet does very well, lasting over 8H30 but it's when you're doing a lot of Internet work that the Xoom will give you over 9 hours.