Motorola Xoom review

To date, Apple’s rivals in the consumer tablet space have been a major disappointment. Despite a splurge of pre-Christmas launches, only a few have proved usable or worth the money, and even then the regular lament at the end of each review has been “okay, but no iPad.” Can the Motorola Xoom change all that?

It’s certainly a possibility, for where all previous Android tablets have been forced to run smartphone-focused versions of Google’s OS, the Xoom runs Android 3 (aka Honeycomb), complete with Google’s snazzy new, tablet-specific front end.

It makes a good fist of competing on the hardware front too. Prise the Xoom from its compact box and you’re met with a handsome piece of hardware. The rear is mostly clad in gunmetal grey aluminium, topped with a rubbery strip housing an 5-megapixel camera, a dual-LED flash, stereo speakers and the power button.

Flip it around, and the 10.1in 1,280 x 800 screen dominates affairs, with a 2-megapixel, front-facing video camera top-centre, a small power LED opposite it, and the Motorola logo discreetly positioned in the top-left corner. The volume buttons are on the left-hand edge, with a headphone socket in the middle at the top, while micro-USB, Micro HDMI out, charging and dock contacts are situated on the bottom.

Build quality is fantastic, and while we can’t say it bests the iPad 2 (it’s 129g heavier and 4.1mm thicker) it certainly runs it close. It’s the most physically alluring Android tablet yet, and blessed with the sort of glamour and luxurious feel the Samsung Galaxy Tab can only dream of.

Under the hood, a dual-core 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 CPU provides the horsepower, complete with 1GB of RAM plus 32GB of integrated storage (16GB and 64GB versions may eventually become available). Other specifications include Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR (supporting Bluetooth keyboards as well as audio devices), dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi and A-GPS. The 3G version is set to cost £100 more.

Software

On paper the Xoom looks formidable, and with its higher resolution screen and cameras it even pulls ahead of the iPad 2 in some respects. The crucial question is whether all this exotic hardware is complemented by good software. From a usability perspective, the answer is a resounding yes.

Android 3 provides a more finely tuned front-end than the smartphone versions on previous Android tablets. It looks great, for starters – think Tron meets Minority Report – and its crisp, sci-fi style graphics provide a nice counterpoint to the soft curves and contours of the iPad’s UI.

The key improvement in Android 3 is proportion. Icons are the right size for larger screens, allowing you to squeeze much more onto the desktop than previously. A thin, permanent toolbar now runs along the bottom of all screens, with Back, Home and a Running tasks icon in the bottom left corner. A notifications area in the bottom-right displays battery life, Wi-Fi signal strength and a clock, and small icons indicate downloads and message alerts appear in the area immediately to the left of this.

As with Android 2, the Xoom also allows you to customise its five desktops with interactive fragments, so you can view recent email, social networking status updates and so on directly on the desktop, in addition to adding shortcuts to applications, contacts and folders.

Tap the plus sign in the top-right corner to launch the customisation view and up pops a far more visual approach to adding elements to your desktop than you get with Android 2. You can still launch apps from the traditional grid view, too, and this is accessible via the Apps link in the top-right corner of the desktop.

The keyboard has been changed, but not radically so. Some keys have been added, including Tab, while the Enter and Backspace keys have moved to more desktop-like positions. One hidden benefit is full multitouch support (up to four points in the case of the Xoom), so you can hold down Shift and type capitals in the same way as you would on a physical keyboard, and hold the number key to shift temporarily to the numbers and symbols keyboard. It’s at least as good as the iPad’s offering.

Apps

That’s pretty much it as far as the UI is concerned, but Android 3 is more than just a barebones operating system. As with iOS for the iPad, it comes with a series of core apps, and these have been given the tablet makeover too.

The email app, which supports Gmail, POP3, IMAP and Exchange accounts, is now split into panes: tap an email header in the left pane, and the message content shows up on the right. The Calendar and Contacts app have been given a similar look and feel.

The browser has been beefed up, with a number of handy extras. You now get a toolbar and tabs displayed along the top of the screen and Incognito browsing, along the same lines as the desktop Chrome browser. Thumb gesture shortcuts let you access common features with a quick swipe of your major digit. And, of course, there’s support for Flash, though we had to download and install it from the Market ourselves.

Make a visit to the Android Market on your desktop PC, and you’ll get a good idea of how Google has tweaked the Market app on Android 3. It’s again divided into panes, complete with a graphics-heavy Featured App area at the top of the screen, a categories listing to the right and more featured apps in the main screen area.

The music player sports a CoverFlow-style interface for browsing through albums, and the YouTube app looks glorious, with featured clips and search results displayed in the form of a giant TV wall – a bit like the start screen you get with the Safari desktop web browser.

As far as third-party software goes, there isn’t much to play with. The Xoom comes with a bare minimum of extra software and no games at all. The most exotic pre-installed software beyond the core apps is Film Studio, a good-looking, but rather basic competitor to the iPad’s iMovie video editing app.

And there are some significant omissions. There’s no Facebook or Twitter integration as yet in Android 3 and, even more irritatingly, no default eBook reader.

All the pre-production Android 3 tablets we’ve seen have sported the Google Books app, but there was no sign of it on this review sample. When we attempted to install it from the Market, the tablet informed us it was “unavailable with this operator”. Presumably this is because the Google Book Store isn’t yet available in the UK.

That wouldn’t be a problem if a decent alternative were available, but we couldn’t find anything that worked really well with the Xoom’s large screen. It’s at this juncture that we hit one of the current limitations with Android 3: there just isn’t enough tablet-specific Android software yet.

Although many of the smartphone apps we tried worked on the Xoom, most didn’t look very attractive. We also came across some that wouldn’t run stably, or at all. The standard Facebook Android app we downloaded kept crashing, Pool Master Pro exhibited odd graphical artifacts we hadn’t seen before, and the Aldiko eBook Reader fell over every time we tried to view books in portrait orientation.

This will change as more developers release HD versions of their apps, but it’ll probably take a few months before the number of good ones hits critical mass. And we think Android 3 also needs to improve the Market interface – it’s crying out for a means of sifting tablet-specific from smartphone apps.

Performance and battery life

Aside from the inevitable grumbles and gripes, after a few days of using the Xoom we came to like it very much. Subjectively, though, despite the dual-core architecture, the performance picture is mixed.

The 3D carousel animation you get when navigating between Honeycomb’s five desktop screens is smooth and responsive, and you’ll be skipping around from app to app, to the homepage and back with the sort of speed you’d hope for.

In our tests, the BBC homepage loaded in five seconds flat and the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark completed in two seconds. The iPad 2, for all its buttery smoothness, couldn’t gain scores any higher than this is so the raw power is clearly there.

Battery life, which has proved a problem for Android tablets in the past, is great too. Motorola claims the Xoom gives ten hours of Wi-Fi browsing, and we wouldn’t argue. In fact, the Xoom lasted 12hrs 49mins in our video test, which involves playing a low resolution podcast video on loop at around one-third screen brightness until the battery dies.

That’s a touch behind the first iPad (13hrs 44mins) and a long way behind the iPad 2’s result of 16hrs 49mins, but it’ll give you a good day or more of casual use, and that’s not to be sniffed at.

Unfortunately for the Xoom, it isn’t all good news. Rotate an iPad 2 from landscape to portrait and the desktop elements flow like quicksilver; do the same on the Xoom and they judder into their new positions. Launch the main app screen and there’s a hint of hesitation as it hoves into view.

While simple sites scroll by in a blur, complex web pages can feel laggy and unresponsive: panning and zooming around the BBC desktop homepage felt like wading through treacle. Not what you expect from a tablet with this much power on tap.

The screen looks fine, with more pixels and a wider aspect ratio than the iPad 2 making it (in theory) better suited to watching movies on the go. And, in isolation at least, it looks bright enough with vibrant colours, good contrast and even decent viewing angles.

Sit it next to an iPad or iPad 2 with the brightness turned up, however, and it immediately becomes apparent there’s a huge difference in quality. The Motorola’s screen is nowhere near as bright or punchy as the IPS-based screen on the Apple devices: colours look wan, and blacks aren’t as deep or dark.

Cameras

At least the camera can boast superior quality to the iPad 2, right? Well, it produces larger photos at eight megapixels, and there are more features on offer, with twin LEDs on the rear for use as a stills flash or a video light. It’ll also shoot 720p video, and the 2-megapixel camera on the front is superior to the iPad’s VGA effort.

Again, though, it isn’t perfect. In our test shots we found the automatic white balance was all over the place, producing cold, bluish snaps under fluorescent office lights more often than not. Outside, it tinged grey skies with a pinkish hue. The autofocus worked well, and pictures looked sharp, but the unnatural colours are a problem.

With the video camera, it’s a similar story. Footage looks a lot less grainy than with the iPad 2, and in our low-light test, colour noise was obvious but more controlled – the colours aren’t as rich or as well-balanced, though. In short, the Xoom’s camera is, like the iPad’s, a big disappointment.

Conclusion

So how do we rate the Motorola Xoom? Well, we like it. Even taking into consideration Android 3’s rough edges, occasional sluggish operation, and the lack of tablet-specific apps, it’s easily the best Android tablet so far, and for many people that will be enough. It’s well-made, the hardware is powerful and battery life is good.

Plus, as with all Android devices, you’re not tied to iTunes. Files can simply be dragged from and to the Xoom’s flash memory. (Note that although there is a microSD card slot, this doesn’t work as yet. Motorola plans to enable it in a later update.) Again, that’s an attraction an Apple device will never be able to compete with.

But before you rush out and buy one, we’d urge you to pause and consider a couple of things. First, the price, which for us is a little on the high side. In many key areas – the screen, the apps, the slick performance and the games – this tablet isn’t as good as the iPad 2, yet it costs exactly the same amount.

And second, it’s just the first in an anticipated avalanche of Android 3-enabled tablets, with Asus, Acer, Samsung and LG all among the Honeycomb pretenders hoping to pull off the same feat for less.

In short, even if you’re desperate to buy an Android tablet that works like an Android tablet should do, we’d advise you hold onto your cash for the timebeing. We’re fond of the Motorola Xoom, but it isn’t everything we’d wished for.

Detail
Warranty	1 yr return to base
Physical
Dimensions	249 x 13 x 168mm (WDH)
Weight	730g
Display
Primary keyboard	On-screen
Screen size	10.1in
Resolution screen horizontal	1,280
Resolution screen vertical	800
Display type	TFT
Panel technology	TFT
Core specifications
CPU frequency, MHz	1,000MHz
Integrated memory	32.0GB
RAM capacity	1,000MB
Camera
Camera megapixel rating	5.0mp
Focus type	Autofocus
Built-in flash?	yes
Built-in flash type	Dual-LED
Front-facing camera?	yes
Video capture?	yes
Other
WiFi standard	802.11n
Bluetooth support	yes
Integrated GPS	yes
Upstream USB ports	0
HDMI output?	yes
Video/TV output?	no
Software
Mobile operating system	Android 3