Motorola Xoom review

The Motorola Xoom was the first tablet PC to be sold with a tablet-specific version of Google’s Android operating system, version 3.0 (Honeycomb). We put it through its paces to see if it can compete with other Tablet PC offerings currently on the market.

The box is a fairly bare affair – only containing the tablet itself, power cable, USB cable and some manuals. The lack of an HDMI cable is slightly disappointing, especially considering that the Motorola Atrix comes with one.

Hardware

The Motorola Xoom boasts an impressive spec sheet, though in Android tablet PC terms, it’s not a particularly differentiating one.

It has an NVIDIA Tegra 2 System-on-Chip with a dual-core 1GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM and either 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of internal storage space (we had the 32GB model) that’s upgradable by up to an additional 32GB via microSD.

For connectivity, it has WiFi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 and optional 3G.

AnTuTu Benchmark gave it a score of 4634.4 (averaged over 5 runs) placing it second to the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer’s 4762.2.

Design and build quality

The first thing you’ll notice about the Xoom is that it seems to be on the chubby side. At 12.9mm thick and 730g, it almost exactly matches the first generation iPad. It’s not outrageously heavy or thick, but it will tire your arms if you’re holding it for long periods of time. Naturally, it doesn’t compare that well to the Apple  iPad 2 (8.8mm thick and ~600g) or the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (8.6mm thick and ~570g).

The back of the Xoom is brushed metal, though the top part of the casing is a hard, matte black plastic. Fingerprints and scuff marks are, for once, not a problem.

The aforementioned plastic part of the casing has two speakers (one on either side), the 5 megapixel camera and dual-LED flash and the power button. The latter is a bit of a deviation from the norm, but it is fairly well placed to be about where your index finger would be when holding the device in a landscape orientation. It’s also indented just enough to make it easy to find in the dark, which then also means that it doesn’t stick out to make the Xoom look lopsided.

Motorola Xoom front

On the left side are the volume buttons, while the right side is bare. The volume buttons are a little tricky to find, harder to press, and sometimes you just don’t know if you’ve pressed it or not.

On the top you’ll find the 3.5mm jack and a slide-out SIM tray that also gives access to the SD card slot. On the bottom are the microUSB, microHDMI and the charging port.

The front is almost all screen, with only a small amount of space around the sides dedicated to the bezel. Embedded in the bezel is the 2 megapixel camera at the top with a small LED next to it to indicate when it’s active, a charging LED at the bottom and a notification LED on the right. Three LEDs, each with its own special function does seem a little over-the-top – perhaps Motorola just wanted to be thorough.

In the end, it’s not a breakthrough design, but it can still be considered good.

Screen and responsiveness

The Xoom has a 10.1” screen that’s capable of 1280×800 resolution and offers up to 10 touch points. Text was crisp, and colours and images were sharp, though whites were a little yellow. While this does make reading marginally more comfortable, it can make things look a little strange at times. In direct sunlight, the Xoom is actually slightly usable – provided that you crank the brightness up to 100%.

Responsiveness was generally good – taps and gestures registered well in general use, browsing, and gaming.

There is one concern worth mentioning: when turning the Xoom into portrait orientation or even upside-down, the UI starts to stutter. Users with the 3.2 update report that this is no  longer an issue. Hopefully this will then be resolved when the S.A. Xoom gets updated to 3.2 in September 2011.

Motorola Xoom rear

Cameras

The 5MP rear-facing camera takes fairly mediocre photos. They aren’t bad, but most smartphones will take better, higher quality pictures. Video capture, on the other hand, was surprisingly good, as was audio capture.

The front-facing 2MP camera is nothing to write home about, but should suffice for video calling.

Audio and video quality

Quality through the embedded speakers was good – more than capable of handling music or audio for the odd video clip.

Video quality was also good with few complaints to be had.

One event worth mentioning here is that the bottom control/status bar vanished during a video test, making it impossible to get back to the homescreen. A reboot fixed the problem and it never happened again, but it’s still not something you’d want to happen.

Battery life

Battery life was acceptable, but not as good as we’d hoped. With medium daily usage, with a constant connection through either WiFi or 3G, you could squeeze about three days out of it.

In our video test, where we cranked the brightness up to 65% and looped some video, the Xoom managed to get somewhere between six and seven hours, with an average time of 6 hours and 16 minutes, placing it second to the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer’s 7 hours.

Software

Carrier or manufacturer additions in the software arena is fairly common in today’s environment. It’s therefore quite refreshing to see that the Motorola Xoom has almost nothing preloaded that could be construed as crapware or bloatware, and only true purists will point fingers at one or maybe two apps.

Conclusion

The Motorola Xoom was the first official Android Honeycomb tablet, and it is a valiant first effort.

In the end, it doesn’t claim king of the tablet hill or even king of the Android tablets because of our (somewhat spoiled) expectations with regards to weight and girth, as well as some buggy software and fairly average battery life.

At an RRP of R6,599, it’s also not particularly aggressive in terms of pricing.

The Motorola Xoom is a good tablet, but it falls short of the top position. It’s worth looking at if you’re considering getting a tablet PC, but odds are that you’d be better of with another.