Motorola Xoom review

Until now, the only real competition to the Apple iPad was a bunch of tablets running tweaked versions of Android for smartphones, most notably the Samsung Galaxy Tab. While some of these have been pretty good, none were perfect. With the Motorola Xoom, the real fight begins, as this is the first tablet we’ve seen to use the tablet-specific version of Google’s mobile operating system – Android 3.0 (Honeycomb).

Comparisons with the Apple iPad 2 are hard to avoid and from a pure hardware point of view, the Xoom competes well with Apple’s tablet. It feels tough and well built. The rear is mostly metal, but the strip of plastic that houses the power button, LED flash and camera lens isn’t as neat as the single block of aluminium that the iPad 2 is made out of.

While the Xoom is fractionally smaller than the iPad 2, as its 16:9 aspect ratio 10.1in screen takes up less room than the 4:3 screen on Apple’s tablet, it’s marginally thicker at 12mm (the iPad 2 is 9mm thick) and weighs more at 720g (the iPad 2 weighs 601g). It’s a weight difference that you can really feel and the Xoom is a little uncomfortable to hold in one hand for long periods. It’s definitely a tablet that’s better off being rested on your lap.

Inside there’s a 1GHz dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, which competes favourably with the dual-core Apple A5 processor inside the iPad 2. With it, the Xoom managed to complete the SunSpider JavaScript test in 2056.2ms, which is marginally faster than the iPad 2’s speed of 2,168ms. It managed to complete the Quadrant Android benchmark with a score of 2,011. This is a similar score to the ViewSonic ViewPad 10s, which has the same processor.

The 10.1in screen has a resolution of 1,280×800, which is higher than the iPad 2’s screen resolution of 1,024×800. The Xoom’s wider screen resolution means that you can fit more on screen, which is better for web browsing. By itself, the Xoom’s screen looks fantastic, with bright colours and excellent viewing angles. Put it side-by-side with the iPad 2 and Apple’s tablet is the clear winner, with its IPS panel that has better viewing angles, less reflections, deeper blacks and more vibrant colours. That’s not to say that the Xoom’s screen is bad, just not as good as the iPad’s.

Battery life is excellent and we managed to last a full weekend of web browsing on a full charge and still had 30 per cent battery capacity left. For watching movies, we found that the tablet lasted 12 hours 49 minutes, which is very good, although it’s around five hours shorter than the iPad 2 lasted.

There’s a mini HDMI output should you want to play videos on a TV. This is located underneath with the docking connector ports. These let the Xoom be hooked up to a speaker dock, which will also charge it.

While the hardware is important, it’s the OS that makes all the difference. It has to be said that Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) is a massive improvement for tablets over previous, unofficial, versions. You can read our full Android 3.0 review for a complete breakdown.

The powerful hardware inside the Xoom makes the OS slick to use for the most part. Switching between any of the home pages is mostly smooth, although we noticed some juddering. Animations, such as zooming out to view thumbnails of all the home screens at once, are quicker. Moving from landscape to portrait happens rapidly with a neat animation flipping between the two, but it’s not always as fast or as responsive as the iPad.

One of the big changes between the Smartphone and Tablet editions of Android is that there are now no dedicated buttons on the devices, bar a power button and volume keys. Everything is done through soft buttons. These pop up at the bottom of the screen, giving you the back button, home button, menu button (if a menu is available) and task-switcher. We love the new task-switcher, which brings up a thumbnail view of all open applications.

Where Android 3.0 has the real advantage over the iPad is with fully-customisable home screens that can contain more than just shortcuts to other programmes. As with the smartphone edition of Android, Widgets are interactive apps that you can place on your homescreen to view information from other applications. So, the Gmail Widget, displays a list of your emails that you can scroll through, or tap one to view it in more detail. Existing widgets for smartphone apps fit well on the screen. There’s a new grid system that defines set areas that Widgets can be placed in. The grid is cleverly designed, so that switching from portrait to landscape (or vice versa) keeps widgets and icons in roughly the same positions.

While existing widgets work well, the disappointment is the lack of updated apps designed for the tablet edition. These mostly work, but some look odd on the high resolution screen, such as Twitter, where Tweets stretch across the entire display. Some, such as the official Facebook app are prone to crashing.

Hopefully more apps will come soon, as the Google apps for Android 3.0 show how it should be done. The Gmail and Email apps now have a list of email and a preview pane that makes them easier to use, making full use of the high screen resolution. We really like the new market, which can best be described as a tablet version of the new web interface.

We’re also pleased to see that Android 3.0 readdresses how storage is used. With the smartphone edition, applications are installed to internal phone memory, which is usually quite lacking, and only some apps can be move to SD card. With the Xoom, the 32GB of storage is shared equally between apps and data, giving more room and flexibility. There’s also a micro SDHC slot, although it’s currently disabled and can’t be used to add more storage. An update will fix this.

There are some disappointments, too. There’s no built-in eReader app and Google Books is completely missing, presumably because it’s not yet available as a service in the UK yet – it doesn’t even show up in the Market App – you can find it in the web version, but can’t install it.

Web browsing has had an overhaul and the browser now has tabs. It can even sync bookmarks with the desktop edition of Chrome, but not yet passwords or forms. It’s slicker than the smartphone edition and we noticed some improvements when we had Flash installed: on some websites on the smartphone edition, we found that some menus would disappear behind flash objects; with the tablet edition, this doesn’t happen and pages are formatted correctly.

However, while most sites are fast to load and quick to scroll around and zoom into, some aren’t coped with as well. Fire up a complex page, such as the BBC homepage and scrolling around just isn’t as smooth. Disabling Flash, so that it only loads on demand does improve the situation, but sites with a lot of elements on them still aren’t quite as quick.

There’s a 5-megapixel webcam with an LED flash. It does a reasonable job of taking shots, but the white balance is often way off and shots start to get noisy in low-light. It can shoot 720p video, but again this can look noisy, while detail tends to be soft. We also found that the screen update while shooting was jerky, although the final videos are smooth.

The Film Studio app lets you trim clips, so you can edit them without a PC. It’s annoying that you can’t share clips from this application, but have the save them, then use the Gallery app if you want to upload the results to YouTube or email them.

It’s good to see that the Wi-Fi only edition of the Xoom has GPS built in, although you’ll need to use Wi-Fi or USB to tether the tablet to your mobile phone if you want to use location-aware applications, such as Google Maps, when you’re out and about.

Price is a bit of an issue with this product, as it costs the same as the equivalent iPad edition (£480 for the Wi-Fi edition and £580 for the 3G and Wi-Fi edition); however, there’s no 16GB version, so you can actually get an iPad 2 for around £100 less than the Xoom.

Given that the iPad 2 is the slicker and lighter of the two tablets, for most people it remains the best choice. That said, if you have an aversion to Apple’s products, the Xoom is the best Android tablet that we’ve seen. With Android 3.0 a massive improvement over the smartphone edition on devices this size.

That said, we urge some caution before rushing out to buy the Xoom, as there’s a whole range of Android 3.0 tablets due to be released soon, some of which are a good deal cheaper. Our advice is to wait for some of these to be released before making a decision.