The Motorola Xoom is the first Android 3.0/Honeycomb tablet to hit the world market although it wasn’t the first to be released here in the UK. The Asus Eee Pad Transformer beat the Xoom to market in the UK. The Motorola Xoom ships with a tablet optimised version of Android, unlike what we have seen on the Samsung Galaxy Tab, Dell Streak and Advent Vega.

So since the Motorola Xoom is pretty much the flagship Android 3.0 Tablet, we thought we would give it a review and see whether it deserves a place in your bag. Be warned, this is a review of both the Motorola Xoom and Honeycomb so it’s pretty long.

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Design Screen Hardware Software Camera Multimedia Browser Applications Benchmarking Battery Hackability Conclusion

Design

The Motorola Xoom weights in at 730g, its deffinetly not going to get any prizes in the weight department as its certainly heavier than many other tablets in the market. When you hold this thing in your hand, before anything else, you’ll definitely notice the weight of this beast. Other manufacturers like Samsung have decided to make their tablets slimmer and lighter by lowering the specifications on their devices, check out the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Galaxy Tab 8.9, Motorola on the other hand has done no such thing. When you read the hardware specifications below, you’ll know why it weights so much. The dimensions of the tablet are: 249 x 167.8 x 12.9 mm, this definitely isn’t the slimmest of tablets either.

While using the Xoom horizontally in both hands, the weight and heft makes it feel very premium, but try and hold it in one hand for a short while and you’ll notice the strain on your wrist. We wouldn’t recommend holding this device up for an extended period of time, unless of course you’re looking for a muscle workout here and there.

The Xoom follows your typical industrial design here, and doesn’t really add much. Its nearly all screen in the front with very little bezel, the bezel, the camera and speaker grill area is black while the rest of the device has a sort of metallic grey finish. The Motorola Xoom looks very good, and in my opinion looks a whole lot better than other Honeycomb tablets out there.

One of the biggest design flaws of the Motorola Xoom has to be its charging connector, it’s so thin and tiny that I keep getting this feeling that it might bend, or even snap off into the Xoom (check the picture on the bottom right). As you can see from the image, the charging connector is slimmer and smaller than the 3.5mm headphone connector next to it.

Screen

The Motorola Xoom has a 10.1 inch 1280 x 800 resolution screen, the wide aspect ratio makes watching things on the Xoom a lot more pleasant. Pixel density on the screen seems a bit low, hence images don’t look as sharp as they do on other tablets but this wont be a problem for you as I doubt you’ll notice unless you’re comparing it directly. Contrast ratio is also another issue but not a big one, when watching video you might notice the images are also a little washed out.

Overall the Xoom’s screen is still very appealing, it’s very bright and clear and the viewing angles are good although not great. If you’re in darkly lit room you wont have too many issues, but use the device in a much brighter area and the viewing angles get slighty worse.

Hardware

When looking at what’s inside the Motorola Xoom, you really are amazed, it was only a couple of years ago that internals like this were only found in laptops but now you can find it in phones and tablets, hell it packs more than some peoples PCs out there. The Motorola Xoom uses the dual-core 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor, it has 1GB of DDR2 RAM and 32GB of internal storage. You’ll also find a 5MP rear facing camera capable or recording in 720p and a 2MP front facing camera that can be used with Google Talk or other video chatting applications.

On the left side of the device. you’ll find the volume up and down keys and you’ll find a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top side of the device just above the camera, to the left of the 3.5mm headphone jack there’s a micro SD card slot that isn’t enabled at the moment. It seems both Motorola and Google rushed the Xoom to market, they should be working on a fix for the micro SD card issue and it will probably reach us in an OTA update, call it wishful thinking if you want. If you have a 3G model of the Xoom, the SimCard goes into the slot above the micro SD card.

At the backside of the device you’ll find 2 speakers for stereo sound which sound very good and loud when holding up the device but place it on the desk and you’ll automatically notice the difference for the worse. Oddly enough the power button to both power on and unlock/lock the screen is also on the backside of the device. I have no idea why Motorola decided to place the power button there, but it’s pretty much a love it or hate it design. When holding the device in landscape with both hands, it’s very easy to to reach the power button with your left index finger, but if you’re not holding the device, it’s not so easy. If the device is on the table or desk, you’ll have to lift it up to press the power button and that can get very annoying. You’ll also find at the bottom side of the device, the charging slot, micro USB slot and mini HDMI out.

The Xoom also packs many other things in to its body such as GPS, digital compass, an accelerometer, ambient light sensor, gyroscope, and surprisingly there’s also a barometer for measuring air pressure.

Software

Now that you have read about the hardware in the Xoom, you should note, that isn’t the most notable thing about the device. The main aspect of the device is Android 3.0 aka Honeycomb, a tablet optimised version of Android designed to be run on larger screens. Version 3.0 has had some very significant changes made to it in nearly every aspect of the user interface and even some changes under the hood, Of course those familiar with Android won’t have too much trouble getting used to it, there’s only a very slight learning curve.

When you first turn on the device and go through setting it up, you’ll find yourself on the devices home screen; the Vanilla Honeycomb Launcher that features 5 customisable home screens. These 5 home screens and the functionality that they provide is what makes it so different from other competing tablets like the ever so “magical” cough…”We do not speak its name” pad.

The Honeycomb lock-screen now features a lock that you kind of push/drag away from the centre of the circle to unlock, while doing this you get a sort of animated ripple effect that looks very cool. You’ll also find the options to use security in your lock-screen, such as pattern lock and other styles of locking your devices from previous versions of Android.

You’ll no longer find hard-keys for navigation (back and home), instead they can be found on the bottom left of the screen regardless of what orientation you’re using the device in. There is a new multitasking soft-key on the bottom left, pressing it displays your 5 most recent applications with thumbnails to make things that much easier. You no longer get to settings via a menu button, pressing on the time at the bottom right of the screen brings up a quick settings option and then clicking on the settings button will bring up the whole setting options as you would expect.

Accessing your application drawer is as simple as pushing the “Apps” icon on the top right of the screen, once the Apps drawer comes up, you scroll through your applications horizontally instead of vertically. Next to to the “Apps” icon there’s also a “+” icon, pressing that brings up a sort of overview mode, allowing you to add short-cuts, widgets to the screen and changing the background.

Among Android’s many features, some would say the most useful features are the widgets, simply put, widgets are sort of like live mini applications or extensions to a full application that runs on your home screen, giving you access to certain information a lot quicker. For example you can have a widget for your GMail, allowing you to scroll through your inbox without having to launch the application itself, other examples of widgets include calender appointments, latest news stories, book-marks, latest YouTube videos and so on.

The Android notification system has also been completely revamped, notifications on Android has always been one of its great strengths, and the evolution of it in Honeycomb appears to be executed very well. Instead of having the notification bar on the top that you slide down, the notifications appear at the bottom right of the screen next to the time, showing you incoming emails, tweets and anything else that you might want to see. As an example (check image below) when you get an email a little box appears, showing you the sender and the subject of the email, a few seconds or so later, the box disappears only leaving an envelope icon in its place.

The keyboard has also been revamped in Honeycomb, and that’s no surprise, it was expected. Typing long emails on a small screen phone is pretty frustrating, so I had a preconceived notion that using the keyboard on the Motorola Xoom might be a whole lot better, well, I wasn’t wrong. You can hold the device in one hand while using the fingers on your other hand to search out and press keys, so it’s great typing short snippets in this way, however I wouldn’t suggest attempting to type an “essay” in this way unless one of your arms is already larger than the other. If you do intend to type a larger amount of text,  you can place the Xoom down on a flat surface and use both your hands to type like you would do on a normal keyboard, I found this way to be very fast and accurate.

Overall the keyboard is very functional and fast but I noticed that while trying to use it in the browser, it still lags occasionally, maybe in future updates this will be fixed. Since this is Android, you can easily download replacement keyboards such as: Swiftkey or ThumbKeyboard, depending on your preferences but the default keyboard should suffice for most people.

Camera

The Motorola Xoom features a 5-megapixel auto-focus camera with dual-LED flash, capable of recording video at 720p, it also features a 2-megapixel fixed-focus front facing camera  that’s intended for video calls rather than taking pictures.  Honeycomb brings with it a new camera application, with all sorts of new effects and shooting modes, all accessible through a  new circular shortcut wheel.

Considering the size of the tablet or any other 10 inch or so tablet in the market, it looks a bit silly pulling it out in the street and taking pictures or video with it. Trust me, I got some very weird looks from people, I guess no ones used to it right now, a bit like when hands-free came out for phones. Using the Motorola Xoom as a camera was very cumbersome, I’m not sure how useful the rear facing camera will be for people as nearly all normal human beings have a camera on their phone, which is much more convenient to use, regardless, since this is a review, we’ll forget that fact for now and carry on.

Some pictures taken with the Motorola Xoom

As you can see from the above samples, pictures taken using the 5-megapixel rear facing camera are very good for a tablet, maybe that’s because I didn’t have high expectations but don’t get me wrong, it’s not outstanding by any means either. Colours aren’t that vibrant and brighter areas are washed out thus missing a lot of detail, but hey, who the hell is going to use this as a camera, please don’t leave your main camera at home. Taking a picture with the Xoom using one hand is very challenging indeed, unless your Popeye. It’s obvious to say that having a second camera can be useful for times when your first one isn’t working, or maybe it will help you take pictures of people’s faces more easily as they look towards you in disgust or confusion, but never the less, having a camera on your tablet is a matter of preference, some will like it, some wont. Maybe we should have done a test on what you can take out faster to take a picture with, the phone in your pocket or the tablet in your bag, but that result to that is pretty obvious.

The 2-megapixel front facing camera seems to do a great job for what it was mainly intended, video chatting worked great on Google Talk, the image was bright and very crisp even while using the tablet tethered to a 3G connection.  I wouldn’t suggest using the front facing camera for taking pictures, the camera has a fixed-focus, so images are not very sharp and can come out blurry.

Video taken with the Motorola Xoom

The Motorola Xoom is capable of recording 720p video at 30fps, Motorola has promised an update to support 1080p at some point in the not too distant future, hopefully before the Motorola Xoom 2 comes out. As you can see from the above video samples. the Xoom does quiet well for a tablet, it’s definitely better than some samples from other tablets and it’s certainly comparable to some high-end phones.  The video recordings are pretty much stutter free although it does (not surprisingly) blur a bit when panning, the video taken at night in lower lighting conditions is also generally good but not great. Sound quality from the recordings are also very decent but that was probably due to the lack of wind and we know how that can affect the sound.

Multimedia

Audio, video and photos can obviously be played on the Xoom itself – when it comes to audio either through listening to music or watching videos, the speakers are fairly good but still underwhelming; I would suggest using headphones or, using the HDMI output to connect to a larger TV. When connecting the device through HDMI out, the Xoom’s entire user interface is mirrored on the external display while still being visible on the Xoom itself, making it that much easier to use. The Motorola XOOM can handle up to 1080p playback but 720p runs a whole lot smoother.

Android has never really supported many codecs out of the box but luckily there are many third-party media players out there that support a whole lot more, my personal favourite is RockPlayer. RockPlayer ran very smoothly for me but you can also try out media players like QQPlayer or MoboPlayer. The Xoom comes with 32GB of internal storage, which should be more than enough for your multimedia consumption needs and once the Micro SD card slot is enabled, you can add up to another 32GB to the device.

Browser

The default internet browser on Honeycomb is definitely one of the best browsers I’ve used on a mobile device, the UI looks very impressive and it feels like a complete desktop experience similar to Chrome even sharing certain components of Chrome like V8. V8 is Google’s open source JavaScript engine that is written in C++ and is said to improve peformance:

“V8 increases performance by compiling JavaScript to native machine code before executing it, rather than to execute bytecode or interpreting it”

Now moving away from the geek talk, in real world performance the browser on Honeycomb is exceptionally fast in loading and rendering websites, thank the holly dual-core processors for that. The browser also features tabs as you would see on the desktop Chrome browser, making it easier to navigate between pages, and due to the 1GB or RAM it’s possible to load up lots of different tabs and still get great performance.

The browser also appears to be able to sync your bookmarks from the desktop Chrome and vice versa although I couldn’t get this to work, I’m sure it would have been great if it did. You can access your bookmarks through the bookmarks icon on the top right, pressing that should display a list of website thumbnails.

Another feature that many of you may be happy to see cross over is the undercover por……mode or as Google likes to call it “Incognito” mode, some of you may use this feature to go on to justinbiebermusic.com or tripple X websites but either way your sick, I’m just messing!

Overall the browser is great, it’s fast, zooming is quick and responsive and scrolling is pretty good. Disabling Flash as “Always On” to “On Demand” will obviously improve performance, but that’s not generally necessary. Even with Flash intensive websites, pages loaded fast and performed well but certain none mobile optimised Flash content can be a little laggy. Most websites ran very smoothly but I was having a little trouble with XDA-Developers, it seems scrolling gets a bit jittery on XDA which I never experienced with earlier Android versions, hmmm…very odd indeed.

Android Market And Honeycomb Optimised Applications

Unlike SOME none Honeycomb Android tablets out there, the Xoom comes with a tablet optimised version of the Android Market, although for some reason the UK Motorola Xoom doesn’t seem to have a section dedicated to optimised tablet applications unlike the US Xooms, this means you’ll have to search for it manually and that’s a little frustrating. Try searching “Android Apps for tablets”, “Honeycomb Optimised”, “Tablet Optimised”, or something along those lines to get a list of applications designed for Honeycomb. The Books section is also missing alongside the actual Google Books application seen on the US versions but that’s because Google Books for tablets is only available in the US at the moment, it’ll come over here across the pond soon, hopefully.

As with any other Android device, the Xoom comes with many Official Google applications that are optimised for tablets, I’ll go through a few of the best ones, my favourites are the GMail and Youtube applications.

One of the most significant new features in Honeycomb is probably Fragments and GMail is a great example of this, using fragments it’s possible to divide the screen up to make use of the real estate e.g. viewing emails next to the list of emails in your inbox.

YouTube has also had a major design change, I must say it looks great and is actually fun to use. When launching the application your shown a carousel of subscription videos made using 3D rendering and Renderscript:

“Renderscript is a scripting language that can be used to produce highly optimised 3D graphics and animations.“

Other than being optimised for tablets, the YouTube application has everything else you would expect, such as the ability to upload videos, like/dislike, comment on videos and so on.

This review is already really long, so I wont go into the other Google Applications on the Xoom. Of course there aren’t that many tablet optimised applications out there at the moment, but it’s slowly getting there. The CNN and Flixster applications are a great example of third-party tablet optimised applications that make use of Fragments.

As I’ve said before, there aren’t that many applications optimised for tablets in the market yet, so some of your favourite applications such as the Official Twitter or Official Facebook isn’t currently optimised, it’s kind of stretched out and doesn’t make use of the screen as it should do. But never the less you should be happy that they’re still usable as many other applications wont even launch, when trying to launch them you get a “Sorry! The Application blah blah blah has stopped unexpectedly, please try again”, actually don’t even bother trying again as it probably still wont work until of course they update it to support Honeycomb.

Benchmarking

As with all our other reviews, we’ve tested 2 of our favourite benchmarking tools on the Motorola Xoom, please keep in mind that the Xoom is stock and isn’t running any custom kernels and so on.

Linpack

• Galaxy SII – 46
• Nexus One (Froyo) – 42
• Motorola Xoom – 40.46
• Desire HD – 39½
• Xperia Play – 38½
• Advent Vega – 36
• Desire Z – 35
• Dell Streak – 33.214
• Nexus S – 14
• Galaxy S (Speed Fix’d) – 9.9
• Galaxy Tab – 14
• HTC Desire – 7
• Dell Streak – 4

Quadrant

• Galaxy SII – 3,000
• Galaxy S (with speed fix) – 2,200
• Motorola Xoom – 2184
• Nexus S (No textures) – 2,100
• Advent Vega – 1,870
• Desire HD – 1860
• Xperia Play – 1526
• Desire Z – 1521
• Nexus One (FroYo) – 1,300
• Galaxy Tab – 1,000
• Galaxy S – 800
• HTC Desire – 520
• Dell Streak – 468
• Milestone – 350

As you can see from the above scores, compared to the other Android tablets we have reviewed, the Xoom fairs very well, it has scored higher on both benchmarks. Normally Quadrant and Linpack scores don’t really equate to real world performance, but in this situation it represents it really well. The Xoom zoomed through every day-to-day tasks without any noticeable delay, panning through the home screens was smooth and so was launching the Apps drawer. Games such as Dungeon Defenders, Guerrilla Bob, Samurai II and a few other games I ran, played very smoothly, both application and games loaded fairly quick and I noticed no lag what so ever. Over all the combination of the dual-core 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor and the generous 1GB of DDR2 RAM has really proven to be something great and formidable, websites rendered similarly to that on a Netbook and the general day-to-day use of the tablet was very smooth.

Battery

The battery life on the Motorola Xoom has been very impressive, even with extremely heavy usage it lasted me over 24 hours, and that’s with out it ever shutting down. I used the Xoom as I would use a Laptop, for browsing the web, watching films, using YouTube and playing games. In total I used the Xoom for about 7 hours, so the remaining time it was in standby, but never the less that’s very amazing.

If you use the Xoom a little less than I did, and I used it a lot for review purposes, you should be able to get more hours out of this device than I did, of course Motorola says you should get up to 10 hours of video playback and it should take 3.5 hours to fully charge the device.

Hackability

Because the Xoom was the first Android 3.0 tablet in the world it gained quiet the following and has many developers behind it. It’s currently possible to root the device, but beyond that is kind of unknown territory as the European Xooms might differ slightly from their US counterparts. The US versions have been over-clocked to 1.5GHz, yes that’s 2 cores running at 1.5GHz each, users have responded with joy and many have said it has improved the Xooms overall performance even more than stock. Obviously I haven’t seen any one do this on a European Xoom yet (let me know if you have).

As with any other hacks/mods, more will come over time, in the mean time you can check out the Xoom section on XDA for more information or check out the Xoom Forums.

Conclusion

Andy’s Thoughts

I’m far from a Motorola fan, but everything about the Xoom says quality. The build feels solid, the small bezel makes it feel much smaller than it’s competitors and Honeycomb seems a fantastic UI for it all to run on.  The apps that have been designed specifically for 3.0 look amazing, lets hope there are more on their way!

Why Buy

• Android 3.0
• Bright and fairly vibrant screen
• Decent viewing angles
• Generous amount of RAM
• Very snappy and good performance
• Decent camera
• Excellent build quality

Why Not To Buy

• Android 3.0 is still kind of buggy
• Not many tablet optimised applications at the moment
• Fairly heavy device
• Micro SD is not yet enabled
• Cannot charge with USB connector

Overall the Motorola Xoom is a great device, I’ve even stopped using my PC when it comes to browsing the web, watching films, using YouTube and other small day to day things one would do. Obviously the Motorola Xoom isn’t a replacement or alternative to a full fledged Computer or Laptop, it’s more of a complementary device and it’s very useful to lazy folks like me who can just sit on the couch or lay down on the bed to check your emails, status updates and so on without having to wait for something to boot up. It’s also a great device to carry in your bag to work or university and it’s a great multimedia device too. The downside to the device would be the weight, although it does feel solid and expensive, it would have been so much better if Motorola put the Xoom through a sort of electronic liposuction as Samsung did with their tablets. Obviously there are a few other annoyances (check above) but in my opinion the positive side out weighs the negative.

In terms of the OS, it’s very well polished, it looks stunning and runs pretty smooth although at certain times it does feel like it was rushed a little to early out the oven. The applications that are optimised for Honeycomb look and work great, but the numbers are low at the moment. It is however a bit too early to judge Honeycomb based on the applications that are currently available. I’m pretty sure the numbers will drastically increase over a short period of time as it did with the phone version of Android, so you can either wait until that happens and then purchase the Motorola Xoom/some other Android tablet or you can buy it now and watch as your baby grows, learns to talk and jump in excitement as it walks.

The Motorola Xoom will cost you £479 for the WiFi only version and a £100 more for the 3G and WiFi version. If you do intend to buy it, make sure to have a good look around the web as you might be able to save an odd couple of quids here and there.

More Motorola Xoom reviews here.