Motorola Xoom

After the iPad arrived, a massive amount of tablets seemed to come out of nowhere all running the Android OS. The major gripe that everyone has had about both the iOS on the iPad and Android is that they are merely giant versions of their smart phone siblings. Motorola has decided to work with Google to address this problem and released their solution during this year’s CES. For those of you who don’t know, CES stands for Consumer Electronics Show and is the largest show of its kind with over 2,000 different companies participating and over 100,000 people coming to visit. CES is famous for the debuts of new technology such as the CD, HDTVs, Xbox, Blu-ray and much more.

After many long hours of work Motorola has released its new tablet, the Xoom. What makes this so special you ask? Well it’s the fact that it is running a version of Android codenamed Honeycomb which was specifically built for tablets. Between this new operating system and Motorola’s impressive hardware the Xoom has managed to win the prized “Best of Show” award. Since the Xoom is obviously aimed to shoot down the iPad from its spot as best tablet, I will for the most be comparing it to the iPad’s hardware.

The first thing that you will notice is that compared to all other Android tablets the iPad is bigger by a few inches but the Xoom on the other hand is actually bigger! The iPad has a 9.7 inch screen with a resolution of 1024 by 768 but the Xoom has a screen size of 10.1 inches and a resolution of 1280 by 800! Even more important than that though, is the fact that unlike the iPad which has an awkward 1:1.33 aspect ratio the Xoom has a 16:9 ratio just like you HDTV at home. What this means is that you will be able to watch movies in the way they were meant to be watched and not stretched in some weird way just because your device’s screen is weird. While the Xoom’s screen is bigger than the iPad’s, it manages to be thinner and weigh the same (730 grams).

Now many people will say that comparing the iPad’s to the Xoom in terms of processor speed and RAM is not fair since the iPad came out almost a year ago and that the Xoom would obviously be better since it is more recent. I DISAGREE. My friends always compare their new phones (like the Droid Incredible) to my year and half old Palm Pre and say theirs is better. So if we are still at the point of comparing the newest phones to one and a half year old Pres which frankly wasn’t the best phone of its time them I’m pretty sure it’s okay to compare the Xoom to the less than ones year old flagship tablet called the iPad. In any case, the Xoom does indeed destroy the iPad in this department. The iPad contains a Cortex A8 1.0GHz CPU with 256MB of RAM whereas the Xoom has a NVIDIA Tegra 2, 1GHz dual-core CPU with a whopping 1GB of RAM. The iPad only has a quarter of the Ram that the Xoom does. The Xoom also has 2 cores which means it can truly multitask unlike the iPad’s cute little popup bar thing at the bottom of the screen that doest really work.

The biggest gripe that people have over the iPad is its lack of camera and any sort of output besides Apple’s proprietary thing. The Xoom on the other hand has a 2MP front facing camera for self shots and video conferencing and a 5MP camera with dual LED flash and 720p video capture. The Xoom has a microUSB, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR and just about any other way to get content on and off and to whatever kind of device you’re after. One of my favorite things about the Xoom though, is the fact that Motorola understands that consumers hate when their expensive devices become obsolete a month after they buy them. So what Motorola has done is when they sell the Xoom at first it will have Wi-Fi and 3G just like the iPad but it is 4G capable so once Motorola figures everything out, which should be sometime in Q2, your Xoom will be 4G capable. Yes this is a tablet and super high speeds aren’t need to browse the internet on it but if you decide to use it as a mobile hotspot for your laptop or computer at home instead of paying for DSL it will be blazingly fast.

Now where the Xoom doesn’t destroy the iPad is in the battery life and storage departments. Both the iPad and the Xoom get 10 hours of video playback time on a single chare which is more than enough for me. In terms of storage the iPad comes in choices of 16, 32 or 64 GB of internal storage. The Xoom comes only with 32GB of storage built in but it has a SD card slot expandable up to 32 GB. I'm sure Apple haters will say that having a SD card slot is better because you can carry around extra SD cards so technically the Xoom has unlimited storage space, but honestly? No one is going to do that.

Final decision?

Xoom > iPad