Motorola Xoom review

The 10.1in screen has a resolution of 1,280×800, which is higher than the iPad 2’s screen resolution of 1,024×800. The Xoom’s wider screen resolution means that you can fit more on screen, which is better for web browsing. By itself, the Xoom’s screen looks fantastic, with bright colours and excellent viewing angles. Put it side-by-side with the iPad 2 and Apple’s tablet is the clear winner, with its IPS panel that has better viewing angles, less reflections, deeper blacks and more vibrant colours. That’s not to say that the Xoom’s screen is bad, just not as good as the iPad’s.

Battery life is excellent and we managed to last a full weekend of web browsing on a full charge and still had 30 per cent battery capacity left. For watching movies, we found that the tablet lasted 12 hours 49 minutes, which is very good, although it’s around five hours shorter than the iPad 2 lasted.

There’s a mini HDMI output should you want to play videos on a TV. This is located underneath with the docking connector ports. These let the Xoom be hooked up to a speaker dock, which will also charge it.

While the hardware is important, it’s the OS that makes all the difference. It has to be said that Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) is a massive improvement for tablets over previous, unofficial, versions. You can read our full Android 3.0 review for a complete breakdown.

The powerful hardware inside the Xoom makes the OS slick to use for the most part. Switching between any of the home pages is mostly smooth, although we noticed some juddering. Animations, such as zooming out to view thumbnails of all the home screens at once, are quicker. Moving from landscape to portrait happens rapidly with a neat animation flipping between the two, but it’s not always as fast or as responsive as the iPad.

One of the big changes between the Smartphone and Tablet editions of Android is that there are now no dedicated buttons on the devices, bar a power button and volume keys. Everything is done through soft buttons. These pop up at the bottom of the screen, giving you the back button, home button, menu button (if a menu is available) and task-switcher. We love the new task-switcher, which brings up a thumbnail view of all open applications.