Motorola Xoom Hands on review

Motorola’s new tablet has finally been announced after months of leaks and rumours about the new device – and while we don’t understand the theory behind the name, the Motorola Xoom is one of the most powerful iPad rivals out there.
With a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor beating with two 1GHz chips, it’s a powerful little grunt-nugget, and the 1280×800 resolution display is a great size at 10.1-inches, making it very much an iPad rival, especially when you consider the similar black bezel is a little thinner.
After the Android 2.2-powered Samsung Galaxy Tab failed to rock our world, we had high hopes for the Xoom, and it looks the part at this early stage.

The dual-core chipset looks like it will really help power along both video and operation, and the early finger responsiveness was excellent, although a little juddery at times.
Things like hitting the menu unlock, which asks you to move a padlock icon out of a circle, wasn’t the smoothest – we hope this kind of optimisation happens in the coming months.

There’s a front-facing video camera for Google Talk (or whichever video calling app you’d like) and a rear facing 5MP offering with dual LED flash for awkward tablet picture-taking – all pretty nice on the spec front so far.

What are missing are the front buttons – no need for them here, as Google has built them right into the Android 3.0OS beating at the heart of the Motorola Xoom.

A 3G SIM slot as well as a microSD opening adorn the top of the Xoom, although the latter actually isn’t supported by Honeycomb as yet – Motorola told us that this was only down to future-proofing the device, and soon it would release an update to activate the feature.

The Xoom actually can be used one-handed in both portrait and landscape mode, although we don’t recommend it if you don’t want to run the risk of dropping it all over the place. Still, it’s good to know you can have a spare palm around if you need it.

Motorola’s gone a little dock happy this time around, and the Xoom has one to go with it, although the only addition is a USB port to plug in peripherals to connect up to the device and watch films or similar.

In terms of functionality, it’s going to be a while until we can give the Xoom a proper hands-on review, as Motorola was reticent to show us all the cool stuff running on the device at this stage of the build – frustrating, but a good way to ward off the negative press an unresponsive unit will bring.

The new features of Android 3.0 look very good though; here’s a run-down of what you can expect:
Google Mail is now divided into two sections, allowing you to see your inbox as well as reply to mails in the same pane. This interface morphs depending on what you’re doing, so if you looking through your various mail folders the right hand pane will show previews of the messages contained within.

Books – the 3D carousel looks very spiffy, and all your titles will be stored on the cloud, rather than the device. You’ll cache them as you read, which means that should you go out of signal you won’t lose the book you’re ploughing through, and if you open the same book on another machine (your PC, for instance) then you can simply pick up where you left off.

The books can be read in both portrait or landscape mode, and while we’re not sure that ebooks on tablets are the most natural way to read prose, it’s perfectly acceptable and large enough.

Video should be pretty good on a device of this size and resolution – the test selection we were shown was impressive enough, although it didn’t blow our socks off in the way some video looks on smaller screens. This is natural given the larger size, but the slightly visible buttons at the bottom of the screen looked a bit scrappy UI-wise.

We’re told that other applications will still stretch video to the larger size for the screen, even though they’re not optimised for Honeycomb as yet – nice work from the development team at Google and good way to keep the applications up to date and relevant.
Google Maps – the same as we’ve seen on other devices, Google Maps 5.0 looks great and speedy on the Motorola Xoom.

3D mode rendered very quickly, and the snap into Streetview was almost instantaneous – the Motorola Xoom has a three point accelerometer, gyroscope and barometer on board, so we reckon Google Maps could make use of this extra functionality in the future and make some even cooler leaps forward.

YouTube – the whole UI for this has been re-developed for the Android 3.0 update, and it certainly looks good. We’re looking at related videos while the main movie is playing, and a 3D carousel of all the current titles related to our search too.
A double tap will bring the main video to the fore, and shows that YouTube video streaming is definitely moving forward to an acceptable point for tablets as well.

Google Talk – as we mentioned earlier, the front-facing 1.3MP camera now enabled video chat on the tablet, and works well on the slate form factor when docked.

The Google Talk application is the best place to get the video chat for the tablet, and you can use both the front and rear cameras for chatting to someone in another place and still see each other.
We’re told it works well over both 3G and Wi-Fi, but we’ll reserve judgement about that until we get the chance to play with it out and about, as there would have had to be some serious optimisation to get 3G video calling working to an acceptable level.
Overall, we’re impressed with the Xoom, and look forward to having a more in-depth play with it than the one Motorola would let us have at the demonstration.

The power and new OS bode well, and certainly offer the chance of better battery life and functionality than the Galaxy Tab, which has failed to impress us despite the level of hype generated by its launch.
Stick around for TechRadar’s in-depth Motorola Xoom review – we’re looking forward to giving the new tablet and Google’s Android 3.0 a really good going over

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