Motorola Xoom Tablet - Can It Kill the iPad?

Motorola's much publicised Xoom tablet, powered by Google's Android 3.0 Honeycomb, goes on sale Thursday with many potential tablet buyers waiting to see how it can fulfill its tag Xoom slogan: Redefining the Tablet Experience. The Motorola Xoom is will be the first tablet to run on the much-awaited Android 3.0 Honeycomb OS and dubbed as the 1st serious competitor to Apple’s iPad. Crowned the best gadget at the giant Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2011 in Las Vegas last month, the hype surround the Motorola Xoom is gaining traction as the official sales date draws closer.

Apple sold more than 15 million iPads since its launch in April 2010 in the timeframe which the iPad had the market virtually to itself. The market for tablet is undeniably huge. No wonder so many are having a go at it. There will be increased competition in 2011 from Google, HP, RIM, Samsung and now Motorola. With the tablet market being such big piece of a pie just sitting their waiting to be captured, Motorola has made the right move to muscle out Apple’s dominance.

The Motorola Xoom hardware supports high-definition 1080p video playback. It has a 2 MP front-facing camera for video chatting via Google Talk over regular Wi-Fi or 3G and a rear-facing 5 MP camera with LED flash for photos and 720p HD video. The Xoom has a 1280×800 widescreen, now--tablet-standard 10.1-inch HD display and 3D graphics acceleration with HDMI-out support for you to hook it up with your HDTV. It boasts a few different types of sensors (gyroscope, magnetometer, accelerometer and barometer). Nope, still no USB port for a tablet. We’re still waiting for the 1st major player to come out with a tablet which has a USB port.

The default advantage that other tablets will always have is Adobe Flash support which Apple iPhone and iPad do not support. However, at first release, Adobe Flash and SD card feature will not be functional. Adobe Flash support will be available through an update via Android Marketplace in Spring 2011. A future software update will enable the SD slot. What a bummer. I guess Motorola must be very desperate to push their product out to the market before iPad 2 does while they let the software update team work on it at the same time. Who knows, this might actually trigger iPad 2 to be launched earlier than Apple had planned. But being typical Apple, they don’t need to because they always say theirs are the best.

The Xoom will run Google's Android 3.0 Honeycomb, whose new features include a redesigned specifically to tablets, tablet-optimized user interface, a 3D desktop purportedly taken from BumpTop (which Google acquired in April 2010), improved multitasking, Google Maps 5 in 3D and browser enhancements. All previous Android tablets, most notably the Samsung Galaxy Tab, have run builds of the OS designed for smartphones, which took a bashing from Apple for ruining the market with a 7 inch screen on a smartphone OS.

The Motorola Xoom is retailed at $799.99 without contract and $599.99 with a 2-year data plan. At a staggering $800 price tag, there also doubters out there thinking anything over $500 cannot compete with the Apple iPad. What say you?

Motorola XOOM Tablet
OSAndroid 3.0 Honeycomb
DifferentiationLarger display in smaller form-factor, 1080p HD support, first tablet with Honeycomb software, dual-core 1GHz processor, and a wide range of docking options
Dimensions249.1mm (h) x 167.8mm (w) x 12.9mm (d)
Display10.1” 1280x800 resolution
Weight730 g
ProcessorNVIDIA® Tegra™ 2: 1GHz dual-core processor
BatteryUp to 10 hour video playback
Connectivity3.5mm, micro USB 2.0 HS, Corporate Sync, Wi-Fi 2.4GHz & 5GHz 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR + HID
Network3G, 4G LTE upgradeable, 802.11n w/Personal Hotspot
Messaging/Web/AppsEmail (Corporate Sync, Google Mail, POP3/IMAP embedded, Push Email, Yahoo Mail) , WebKit w/ Flash
AudioAAC, AAC+, AMR NB, AMR WB, MP3, XMF
Video720p capture/1080p playback/streaming, H.263, H.264, MPEG4
Camera5 MP rear-facing camera with dual LED flash/2MP front-facing camera
Memory32GB on board user memory, SD card support after software update, 1GB DDR2 RAM

And you can get your hands on one easily via Amazon.com, my favorite and most trusted online market place. Oh yeah, by the way, now Amazon Prime members can enjoy Instant Video streaming. We’ll see how many would swap NetFlix for Amazon Prime in 3 months.