Motorola Xoom Tablet Review - Android 3.0 Arrives

The Motorola Xoom has a lot of good things going for it. We loved the Xoom's colorful, high-res display with excellent viewing angles. We also appreciated the tablet's speed and smooth performance. For tablets, Android 3.0 is a definite improvement over previous versions of Android as well.

Price is something many people bring up when trying to compare the Xoom to the iPad and other tablets. In this review, we took a closer look at the Motorola Xoom for Verizon Wireless. There is also a Wi-Fi only version of this tablet. In terms of price, the least expensive Xoom is about $100 more expensive than the least expensive iPad.

Keep in mind, however, that the $499 iPad 2 has 16GB of storage and the $599 iPad 2 has 32GB of storage. When looking at both tablets with 32GB of built-in storage, the Xoom and the iPad 2 have identical price tags. If you're considering a tablet tied to a wireless contract, the Xoom comes in cheaper than even the least expensive iPad tied to either Verizon Wireless or AT&T.

We wish the tablet would have shipped with Flash preinstalled and the microSD slot enabled. We also wish Motorola and Verizon would have been able to pull off shipping this tablet with LTE enabled rather than asking users to send the tablet back to Motorola for the upgrade. Although the upgrade is free, it will require doing without it for a little while.

Our overall impression of the Xoom from Verizon Wireless was a very positive one. We felt the tablet was powerful and responsive. In our benchmarks, the Xoom posted competitive scores.

1GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 Dual Core processor Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) Great battery life	microSD slot isn't enabled, yet LTE upgrade requires sending the device to Motorola Pricey compared to Android 3.0 tablets recently launched