Review of Motorola xoom

Hardware:

The basic specs are familiar, but worth repeating. The Xoom has a Tegra 2 processor with dual 1GHz cores; 1GB of RAM; a 1280 x 800, 10.1-inch screen in a movie-friendly16:9 aspect ratio; front and rear-facing cameras; HDMI output; a microSD card slot; and built in 3G, upgradable to LTE 4G. On paper, this thing blows away the current Apple iPad (which is rumored to be up for an upgrade next week, but still…) and when it comes to launching and switching between apps, the Xoom is noticeably faster, but it is still surprisingly slow when it comes to things such as orientation switching and boot time (I timed its cold startup at 48 seconds, the iPad took 33 seconds).

In the hand, the Xoom is about the same weight as the iPad, although it's narrower bezel makes it look sleeker. The fit and finish, though, was a bit embarrassing. Maybe our Xoom was a pre-production unit that somehow slipped through quality control, but it had a raised seam across the back that felt as if the plastic were about to pop open at any moment and spill its circuitry all over the floor. Plus, I knew that 4G would have to wait until an upgrade was available, but I was totally shocked to discover that the microSD slot isn't currently functional as well.

The screen is quite beautiful and high resolution. Like the iPad, it shows fingerprints easily and is subject to glare. Also like the iPad, orientation lock and brightness controls are part of a quick-launch submenu, although there dedicated volume control buttons. The familiar Android Home, Menu, Back and Search buttons are now all on-screen soft keys, an understandable concession to the “any which way is up” use case inherent to tablets. 

Software:

I'm totally conflicted about Honeycomb. It obviously has a lot of promise, but there are plenty of frustrations waiting to be discovered by early adopters. It reorients several aspects of the Android OS familiar to smartphone users. The windowpane drop down menu is gone, the app browser/launcher is now in the upper right corner, and in the lower right corner is a battery meter/clock/wireless signal indicator that doubles as a quick launch for commonly used settings—it has more than a passing familiarity to the Windows system tray. Widgets and quick launch app icons can be arranged on five “home screens” which can be configured any way you like. Widgets are updated with live content, and some, such as Gmail and the browser, can be scrolled through without launching the app. There are also some nice touches, such as live wallpaper and some clever 3D effects that make for some of Honeycomb's most playful features.

That said, the Xoom, and Honeycomb in general, are not too friendly to your content. As I mentioned before, the microSD slot is currently dead, and the Xoom wasn't even recognized by my Mac when I first plugged it in. When I switched to a PC, I was able to see the Xoom as a peripheral device, then drag and drop media into its folder architecture. That was fine for music and pictures, but, like the iPad, the Xoom won't natively play .avi files—the most common Windows video file format. That's too bad, since it took 40 minutes to transfer a 720p file to the device only to find out that it wouldn't play. MP4 files play smoothly and beautifully, but as the iPad alternative, it would be nice to see a universal video player on the Xoom. In fact, it would be nice to see any dedicated video player in the Honeycomb software at all. Instead video plays through a “gallery” app that blends video and photos together, including any photos linked to your Google account. The blending of online and locally stored content is an interesting idea, but the organization of it all seems a bit scattershot. Music is organized using a 3D browsing metaphor reminiscent of Apple's coverflow. It looks pretty, but can get a bit tedious when browsing a large database. Fortunately, you can also arrange by artist or album—which I guess goes to show that there's not too much innovation left to be done with music database management.

Where the Xoom really seems to shine is games. Favorites such as Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja scale up nicely from their phone apps, while tablet-specific 3D games such as Cordy are fast and beautiful—which shows off the processor nicely.

The Bottom Line:

At its best, the Xoom is a fast and impressive beast, chewing through processor-intensive tasks like tabbed browsing with ease. But it's really hard to get past the device's $800 price tag ($600 with a two-year contract—which actually puts you on the hook for much more cash). Especially when you consider that most of the apps that will make Honeycomb really shine have yet to be written, and support for Flash—the main differentiator for the Xoom, is not yet operational. The Xoom is a promising start of something, but paying a lot of money for the start of something isn't half as rewarding as paying a lot less for something once it's complete.