Motorola Xoom Tablet, With Its Tablet-Optimized Android Honeycomb OS, Looks Like a Contender

Motorola and Google take square aim at the iPad with an impressive new tablet

By John Mahoney Posted 01.05.2011 at 8:26 pm 7 Comments

Motorola Xoom John Mahoney

The legions of CES tablet wannabes can give up now: Motorola just killed it with their much-rumored Xoom tablet, an iPad-sized black slab whose beauty is within, in its Android 3.0 Honeycomb OS. Designed by Google from the ground-up with touchscreen tablets in mind, it's the first software experience that looks like it can go toe-to-toe with Apple's iOS.

There weren't any fully working models for us to play with here at Motorola's press event, but several hardware-final tablets were on hand playing demo videos of Honeycomb's interface and features:

Specs wise, the Xoom sports a 10.1-inch 1280x800 screen, Verizon 3G onboard (which is actually upgradeable to 4G LTE later in the year), 1080p HD video playback and streaming, front and rear cameras for videochatting, and an SD card slot for additional storage.

It's of course impossible to judge the Honeycomb Experience (a phrase I'm cribbing for my new laptop ambient music project) without actually having a working tablet in our hands. But if the actual feel of the device is as slick as the demos make it out to be, I'm excited. Now the obvious question is, are all those tablets running previous versions of Android (including Samsung's Galaxy Tab) upgradeable to Honeycomb? Considering Android's messy upgrade process on phones, Tab owners probably shouldn't hold their breath.

The Xoom From the Back: John Mahoney

See the rest of PopSci's live CES 2011 coverage here

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7 Comments

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Vega_Obscura

01/06/11 at 12:10 am

I find it funny how there are so many vehement Apple haters that constantly tout the superiority of non-Apple products in Apple related articles, yet if it weren't for Apple, the touch screen smartphone industry nor the tablet computer industry would be where it is today.

So keep endorsing the bandwagon products, just remember who's blazing the trail.

Not that any of these products are bad or possibly better, which they likely are since they have a great example to learn from, it's just important to give respect where it's due.

Just because you like one product doesn't mean you have to dislike the other one...

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FrogOutOfaWell

01/06/11 at 1:09 am

Apple being hatted is analogous to Microsoft being hated over google,

@Vega_Obscura
The reason being both are money mongers and others prove them wrong, time and again by delivering the same or superior products without the hefty cost.

Remember skynet can not be stopped it can only be delayed so eventually some one would have come up with windows or I's,
The learnings are, be customer friendly not customer money friendly and the money will follow.

════════════════════════════════════════════
why, mr. Anderson, why, why do you persist?
Because I Choose To...
Regards
════════════════════

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engineerzero

01/06/11 at 1:31 am

I would have bought an iPad if it could do Flash and save to a memory card. So if an Android-based tablet that can do those two things, I'm definitely thinking about buying.

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sas82

01/06/11 at 4:22 am

yep, I think it's too bad the iPad doesn't have those extra things.

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DMACRIA

from Cedar Rapids, IA

01/06/11 at 10:52 am

Yup - and hopefully a better daylight screen image also.

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pits.and.mcgoo

01/10/11 at 5:36 am

Android 3.0 Honeycomb OS requires a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 .... so far Motorola for sure and maybe Toshiba is the only hardware it can run on. And forget about upgrading an old 2.2 droid to 3.0.. can't be done because of hardware. I can't see how they are any real competition to Apple until they get the hardware prices down so the manufacturers can sell it reasonable. Apple prices keep coming down and are very competitive. If you don't think so, go over to Best Buy and watch how many go out the door.

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easonyoun

01/16/11 at 1:45 am

Android 3.0 Honeycomb OS requires a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9:
I got one 10.1 Inch Malata Zpad T2 tablet uses Cortex-A9 core. So exciting!
here: wholesaleonepiece.com/101-inch-malata-zpad-t2-android-22-nvidia-tegra-2-cortex-a9-1ghz-tablet-pc-w-capacitive-multitouch-screen_p2135.html