Hands on with the Motorola Xoom

The Motorola Xoom tablet, which hit stores this morning, feels like a cross between a Droid smartphone and an iPad--that's what I found after a couple of hours of getting my feet wet with the new tablet. It's a worthy, if pricey, competitor to the original Apple iPad and, most likely, to the new iPad that Apple is set to unveil next Wednesday.

Compared with a number of the tablets I've used in the past couple months, the Xoom has a larger and higher-resolution display (10.1 inches, 1,280x800) and better access to apps--the full Android Market, as opposed to some proprietary app store.

Like the iPad, the Xoom has a snappy, responsive (capacitive) touch screen with a wide viewing angle in all four directions. Unlike the Samsung Galaxy Tab that I used a couple of months ago, it has a full-blown tablet operating system, Android 3.0 (Honeycomb), which is far better suited to a tablet than were the older smart-phone versions of Android, found on previous Android tablets.

While Android 3.0's user interface expands upon the earlier versions of Android, it retains a number of elements from the smartphone operating system, such as multiple swipeable home screens, a notifications bar, settings list, and an apps display. They may be located in a different spot than on phones and not look exactly the same as their predecessors, but if you've used an Android phone, they will feel familiar.

It has been widely noted that the Xoom has ports and connectors that the original iPad lacks, such as a USB port, microSD card slot [corrected], and HDMI connector. But the SD slot doesn't work yet; the documentation says a software upgrade is required to activate it. And the small, removable cover for that slot could easily be lost, which is not the case with SD slots on some other tablets.

The Xoom also has a slot for a SIM card for future upgrading to Verizon's 4G LTE network. Verizon says that upgrading will require returning your Xoom to Motorola, and the carrier recommends you back up and remove confidential, propietary, or personal information before doing so.

I also found the Xoom's power adapter a bit fragile. It looks as if it wouldn't be too difficult to inadvertently bend and impair it.

When I accessed the Android Market app store on the Xoom, I found a couple of categories of apps that I don't see when I access the store using a Droid phone: One is a category for tablet apps, which (when I checked today) contained 12 apps; Apple reportedly has tens of thousands of apps for the iPad. Another is a Verizon "department" within the app store where, presumably, the carrier offers 22 apps, most free but a few requiring purchase. Looks like Verizon is in the software business.

So far, I haven't found any apps on the Xoom that can't be uninstalled, unlike on the Verizon version of the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Maybe Verizon has finally learned its lesson about disabling functionality on consumer products.

While it's true that--at $799 without a contract and $599 with one--the Xoom is pricey, it's not that much more expensive than a 3G iPad with the equivalent 32GB of storage, which runs $729. But with the iPad, you do have the option of stepping down to a Wi-Fi only model with 16GB for just $499.

We'll have more on the Xoom, including the all-important battery-life tests, as soon as we spend a little more time with it. Meanwhile, anyone considering a tablet should at least wait until next Wednesday, when Apple unveils the new iPad, before making a purchase.

--Jeff Fox

—Jeffrey Fox