Google’s first serious tablet push didn’t start with a Pixel Slate or a Galaxy Tab partnership. It started with Motorola, Honeycomb, and a 10.1‑inch slab called the XOOM that was supposed to be Android’s big-bang moment against the iPad.
In theory, it had everything: dual‑core Tegra 2, a higher‑res display than Apple, expandable storage, HDMI out, and the first tablet‑optimized Android UI. In practice, the XOOM is a textbook case of what happens when good hardware ships with beta‑feeling software, unfinished features, and pricing that assumes you’re already in the ecosystem.
Design, Display, and the Hardware Story Motorola Nearly Nailed
On the surface, the Motorola XOOM looked like a serious, premium answer to the iPad 2. It packed a 10.1‑inch 1280 x 800 TFT panel at 149 ppi, edging out Apple’s tablet on sharpness and making reading reasonably comfortable. The chassis mixed glass, metal, and plastic with rounded corners, tapered edges, and a thin bezel that actually made it look modern for its time.
The numbers on the display are weirdly impressive. At full blast the XOOM hits 436 nits of brightness—brighter than both iPad and iPad 2 in the same tests—and a ridiculous 2041:1 contrast ratio, beating every LCD they’d measured, including the so‑called “Retina”, “Reality”, and “NOVA” branding exercises. On paper, that’s flagship‑class even by today’s standards.
Real‑world use ruins the party. The TFT panel shifts color and loses contrast at even small viewing angles. The coating is highly reflective, so indoors you’re constantly fighting glare; outdoors it’s worse. Even at max brightness you’re mostly looking at reflected clouds or your own face. Fingerprints build up fast and aren’t easy to wipe off. The hardware is technically strong, the optics and coating decisions are not.
Physically, it’s a tank: about 730 g, slightly larger than an iPad 2, with great build quality but poor ergonomics. One‑handed use is tiring and the smooth metal back is slippery, which is exactly what you don’t want on a 730 g device you’re trying not to drop.
Controls and Ports: Sensible Standards, Strange Decisions
Motorola did a lot right with I/O. On the bottom you get microUSB, microHDMI, a docking connector, and a 2 mm barrel charger port. Up top there’s a 3.5 mm headphone jack and a tray that holds both the full‑size SIM and the microSD card slot. No proprietary video dongles, no nonsense—just standard ports that should have made the XOOM a connectivity beast.
But almost every smart decision comes with a catch. The microUSB port won’t charge the tablet; you’re forced to use the 2 mm charger that’s almost laptop‑sized. USB host is supported in theory, but only after an Android 3.1 update. The microSD slot is physically there and labeled for up to 32 GB, yet completely disabled in software at launch. Motorola even ships a transparent dummy with tiny text telling you to wait for an Android update before using it.
The power/lock button is on the back, flush with the surface, near the rear 5 MP camera and one of the stereo speakers. In landscape it’s reachable; in portrait it’s awkward and easy to cover with your hand. On a table, waking the device is annoying. Volume keys on the left side are small, recessed, and uncomfortable to press. The front is almost totally clean—no hardware keys thanks to Honeycomb’s on‑screen controls—but that just makes the back‑mounted power key sting more.
Battery is a sealed 24 Wh unit rated for around 10 hours of Wi‑Fi browsing or video playback and about three and a half days of music. In testing, it managed about 7 hours 50 minutes of browsing over Wi‑Fi, which is respectably close to the claim. So endurance isn’t the problem; usability quirks are.
Honeycomb: Ambitious Tablet UI, Slowed by Its Own Software
The real story of the XOOM is Honeycomb, Google’s first tablet‑focused Android build. Unlike Apple’s early strategy of basically scaling a phone OS up, Honeycomb redesigned the UI to take advantage of more resolution and more screen space.
System navigation keys (Back, Home, and a new task switcher) move on‑screen to the lower left. Status icons, including notifications, live in the lower right, and pulling them up gives you a compact pop‑up instead of a full‑screen shade. Search jumps to the top left, while the app launcher and homescreen edit button live at the top right, making the whole layout feel more desktop‑like.
Homescreen editing finally takes advantage of the big display: you see all five panes at the top and four tabs at the bottom (widgets, apps, wallpapers, and “more”), then drag items directly where you want them. It’s miles better than blindly swiping through screens on a phone. The app drawer gets split into “All” and “My apps,” and long‑pressing an icon lets you drop shortcuts directly onto any homescreen.
Conceptually, Honeycomb is strong. In practice, the XOOM feels like a pre‑release unit. Even with a static wallpaper and zero user apps running, lag is frequent, especially in portrait mode. Benchmarks show Tegra 2’s dual‑core 1 GHz silicon has muscle, but the UX doesn’t reflect that. Scrolling hitches, animations stutter, and live wallpapers tend to pixelate and drag, which is embarrassing for a product sold as the flagship of a new platform.
The browser is a similar mixed bag. The interface looks like a desktop browser, with tabs in a bar on top, a combined address/search field, bookmark and history views with split‑screen, and optional Chrome sync with a single checkbox. There’s even an alternate gesture UI for quick back/forward/refresh.
Flash support is the headline, and it technically works, but performance is capped. Embedded 360p runs fine, 480p is watchable but not excellent, and 720p Flash is basically unusable. That’s awkward when some Android phones manage 720p or even 1080p Flash playback. You can switch Flash to on‑demand to keep pages from dragging, which you’ll probably want to do.
Media and Cameras: Capable Audio, Half‑Baked Video
For audio, the XOOM actually performs well in lab testing. At sane volume levels, dynamic range, signal‑to‑noise ratio, and stereo crosstalk are all excellent—easily comparable to the best devices tested. Push volume to max and quality drops; Motorola is clearly over‑driving the hardware, just like on the Atrix. Dial it down a couple notches and you get clean sound that just isn’t as loud as you might expect from a chunky tablet.
The stereo speakers are spaced apart on the back, which helps stereo separation, but the curved back doesn’t fully protect them from being muffled when laid flat. Headphones hurt crosstalk a bit and add some distortion at low frequencies, but the overall audio stack is still solid.
The music player UI is one of the nicer Honeycomb‑era apps, with filters for album, artist, song, genre, and playlists, plus quick access to “new and recent.” Cover art, split‑screen track listings, and notification‑shade controls all work well. The missing piece is any kind of EQ or audio tuning.
Video is where things fall apart. There’s no dedicated video app; you have to use the gallery and manually filter for videos. Codec support is basic—no DivX or Xvid—so your choices are converting files or installing third‑party players that will likely be less optimized. Without USB mass‑storage mode, even copying content on is more painful than it should be. Combine that with a highly reflective display that’s borderline unusable outdoors and you end up with a pretty mediocre media tablet despite the specs.
Cameras are similarly middling. The rear 5 MP shooter with dual‑LED flash and the 2 MP front‑facer are fine for video calls, AR apps, and quick document snaps. The interface keeps things simple: a dial with flash, white balance, color effects, scenes, and a separate settings menu for resolution, quality, focus mode, and exposure.
Image quality is just average for 5 MP. Detail is lacking, colors are off, and dynamic range is narrow. Low noise is one of the only positives. In controlled comparisons, it keeps pace with Motorola’s own Atrix but loses badly to the iPhone 4. Video recording tops out at 720p on both cameras, which is odd given the same Tegra 2 chipset in the LG Optimus 2X handles 1080p. You can get YouTube‑acceptable clips, but the weight and form factor make stable shooting difficult.
Productivity, Apps, and the Ecosystem Problem
Core productivity apps are where the XOOM shows both Honeycomb’s promise and its constraints. Contacts are laid out with a split view: list on the left, details on the right, plus search and quick add/edit controls. There’s no telephony, so tapping phone numbers doesn’t do anything, but email and web fields open their respective apps immediately.
Email is handled by two optimized clients—Gmail and a generic POP3/IMAP app—both using a split layout. Folder lists, message lists, and message content flex based on what you’re doing, and batch actions plus configurable sync intervals make managing heavy inboxes practical. Attachments can be restricted to Wi‑Fi only. The on‑screen keyboard takes up about half the display; it’s not a hardware keyboard, but for short mail it holds up fine with auto‑correction and auto‑caps. There’s no haptics, just sound.
The gallery is familiar Android territory, tweaked for large screens. Photos (including Picasa) can be sorted by album, date, location, or tag, with filters for images/videos. A nice accelerometer‑based 3D tilt effect on multi‑image albums gives some visual flair. The big flaw: it shows downsized versions of your photos, not full‑res, so you can’t actually inspect all the detail you’d expect on a 10.1‑inch, 1280 x 800 panel.
The app situation is the other major drag. The tablet‑optimized Android Market UI is actually good—fast searching, easy browsing—but most of the “hundreds of thousands” of apps aren’t built for 1280 x 800 tablets. WVGA apps scale up acceptably but not perfectly smooth; lower‑res apps are basically a write‑off.
Worse, many apps that run fine on single‑core WVGA phones exhibit weird lag and stutters on the XOOM. That’s less a silicon issue and more about poor early optimization for Honeycomb and Tegra 2. Developers aren’t going to rush to fix that for a product that’s “hardly selling in millions,” so Motorola is stuck in a chicken‑and‑egg situation: no user base, no optimization; no optimization, no user base.
Connectivity and Value: Great Potential, Poor Positioning
On paper, the XOOM’s connectivity story is excellent. You get dual‑band Wi‑Fi (2.4 and 5 GHz), GPS, Bluetooth with file transfer, and HSDPA 10.2 Mbps / HSUPA 5.76 Mbps on the 3G model. The Verizon version is slated for an LTE upgrade via software later. MicroUSB with planned host mode, microHDMI TV‑out without proprietary adapters, and a microSD slot that will eventually support 32 GB cards round out what should be a very flexible device.
The problem is how much of this ships half‑done. USB host: “coming with Android 3.1.” LTE: a future enable. microSD: physically there, but inert until some later build. Charging over USB: simply not supported at all. This is a classic early‑adopter trap—pay full price for a roadmap, not a finished product.
And that price is the final nail. Motorola doesn’t undercut the iPad 2; it’s actually more expensive. Android phones gained traction partly because they were cheaper than equivalent iPhones while offering more flexibility. The XOOM flips that: it costs more while delivering worse perceived performance, fewer fully optimized apps, and more rough edges. Apple can charge a premium because people already trust the experience. Motorola can’t assume the same loyalty and then ship something that feels like a beta.
The XOOM’s Legacy: Ambitious, Important, But Hard to Recommend
The Motorola XOOM matters historically. It’s the first Honeycomb tablet, the first serious shot at a tablet‑native Android UI, and a device that proved Google and partners were willing to rethink the interface instead of just blowing up a phone launcher. Hardware‑wise, it checks most of the boxes: dual‑core Tegra 2, 1 GB RAM, 32 GB storage on the 3G model, a higher‑res screen than the iPad 2, microHDMI out, and an eventually‑powerful connectivity stack.
But tablets live or die on user experience, and that’s exactly where the XOOM falls short. Laggy navigation, unfinished features, missing codecs, awkward ergonomics, and a weak app story undercut the strong spec sheet. Honeycomb shows real promise but feels like a public beta. For a device that costs more than the iPad 2, that’s not acceptable.
If you strip away the context and judge it purely as a consumer product, the conclusion is blunt: the XOOM is not something you should buy, especially at its original price. If you care about raw potential and Android history, it’s fascinating. If you care about a smooth, enjoyable tablet, you’re better off elsewhere.
Check back soon as this story develops.
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