It is raining tablets in India, just a few days back it was the BlackBerry Playbook and now it is the Motorola Xoom Android tablet that is making buzz in the Indian markets.  The Motorola Xoom is the first of its kind to be powered by the Android Honeycomb 3.0 OS and is priced more than the BB Playbook in India.

Motorola Xoom Tablet features

This tablet houses a 1GHz Dual Core Processor from NVIDIA Tegra 2 with 1GB of DDR2 memory. This processor and memory combination makes the Xoom perform exceptionally well; it can play HD games, movies and even browse heavy flash based sites with ease. The Xoom supports Adobe flash 10.1.

The Motorola Xoom comes with a large 10.1 inch WXGA widescreen display with HD support.  The display screen supports a resolution of 1280×800 pixels with 16 million colours. The Xoom weighs 730 grams and is of dimension 249.1×167.8×12.9mm.

Camera

This Android tablet from Motorola comes with two cameras, a primary camera of 5 megapixels with LED flash and a secondary camera for 2 megapixels.  This tablet can also record videos in 720p HD mode.

Motorola Xoom back side 5 MP camera
Motorola Xoom back side 5 MP camera

Android Honeycomb 3.0

This is the new Android OS from Google especially optimized for tablets. In other words the Honeycomb 3.0 is the official Google Android OS made for the tablets. There are some new features such as the Google voice search / Search button, that one will find on the home screen. The Android 3.0 OS also gives the freedom to place the widgets anywhere on the home screen. If you compare the Android OS with previous versions you will find it better optimized for games and reading e-books or magazines.

The Motorola Xoom running on the Android Honeycomb 3.0 Tablet OS
The Motorola Xoom running on the Android Honeycomb 3.0 Tablet OS

Design

When you look at the Motorola Xoom for the first time you can almost immediately see the difference. The hard menu buttons are replaced by soft menu buttons. There are no hard keys just soft keys that are placed on the touch screen itself. The soft keys are made to follow you, just rotate the tablet and the keys will position just like they did before.

Connectivity

The Xoom tablet comes with Wi-Fi and the improved webkit browser. Browsing is fast and this is the first time that the tab browsing featured on an Android OS.  The experience is just like on a desktop with multiple tab features. The Motorola Xoom features GPS with A-GPS that works seamlessly with Google maps 5.0.

Overview

Performance wise the Xoom rocks, thanks to the dual core processor and other impressive hardware capabilities. Motorola Xoom has the features to compete with the Apple iPad 2. With Android 3.0 you get to link and synchronize multiple Google Accounts and get access to Android market where you can download and install thousands of apps.

Motorola Xoom Tablet (Wi-Fi) price in India
Motorola Xoom Tablet (Wi-Fi) price in India

Battery

The Motorola Xoom comes with 1680+1680 mAh battery that can last for 14 days on standby mode and gives a talktime of up to 10 hours with Wi-Fi.

The battery life is excellent and here are the results when compared with other tablets.

Tablet Battery Life (Hours)
Motorola Xoom 8.20
BlackBerry Playbook 9 to 10
Samsung Galaxy Tab 6.10
Apple iPad 2 9.20
Dell Streak 7 3.30

Other features

Xoom also features Bluetooth 2.1, USB 2.0, WAP, Java, Barometer, quick office viewer, ambient light sensors, Proximity sensor and Gyroscope.

Price in India

Motorola Xoom (Wi-Fi) 32GB Price MRP: Rs. 34,490 | Best Price: Rs. 21,500 with 1 year warranty.
Motorola Xoom (3G) 32 GB Price MRP: Rs. 41,490 | Best Price: Rs. 25,000 with 1 year warranty.


By Rajeev Rana

Founder and Chief Editor - gogi.in