Why would I want to buy a tablet? So that I can avoid dragging myself home to check mail on my PC? To catch up on ‘The Simpsons' while I'm on a long-haul flight? To satisfy my FB-stalker urges without my co-workers thinking I'm a creep? Check all of the above, and more. Tablets are eating into personal computer and laptop shares by avoiding the loopholes of the former and making a killing of it. For a niche that is relatively nascent, it's no wonder that every gadget brand wants a slice of the tablet pie. But who has what it takes to make a tablet really desirable?

Motorola's first tablet – the Xoom – was the very first tablet to run on Honeycomb. Will it make the cut?

Time to shed some!

Having earlier carried around the iPad 2, the Motorola Xoom feels a little bulky. It's almost 200 grams heavier than the other tablet that has been receiving rave reviews – the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. This means it is fine as long as you have it propped up on your lap but the moment you hold it up to play ‘Drunk Man' or ‘Lane Splitter' you'll have to give your arms a rest almost immediately.

The situation was only too familiar when I was reading an e-book on the Amazon Kindle app. A couple of pages into ‘The Grapes of Wrath' by John Steinbeck and I feel the strain, and am inclined to prop it up against something. Maybe the Portfolio Case or the Dock (both accessories) on the Motorola web site have been listed there with good reason. However, the 10.1-inch screen was a decent display to read e-books on. Trying out the Xoom, it felt like the tablet was made to be held in the landscape mode due to its uncommonly long-ish screen (24.9 cm). The almost-widescreen aspect ratio of the Xoom, however, lends itself better to watching movies than reading digital books.

Sound strategy

And that brings me to one of the best features on the Motorola Xoom. It aces the multimedia department. I kept myself entertained for a few hours with multiple episodes of ‘The Office' (yes, our team's obsessed with the show) on the Xoom and my only complaint was the rather glossy screen which gave off a lot of glare.

High-res videos look great on the wide display, and videos appear detailed thanks to the high-res 1280x800 pixel screen (a standard on most 14 or 15-inch laptops). And it's not just the screen, but also the remarkable sound quality by which the Xoom manages to impress. The stereo speakers (lodged on the dual-tone back panel) deliver crisp, clear sound without even a hint of distortion at the highest volumes.

Commonplace clicker

Even if you were Moses reincarnated, it'd still look ridiculous holding a 10.1-inch tablet to your face to click pictures. And the 5-megger on the Xoom, in any case, isn't a clicker that'd make you want to sacrifice your dignity to get that awesome FB profile-worthy pic. A couple of portraits that we clicked were reasonably sharp, although the colours were underwhelming. The results are slightly better outdoors if you can see past the swipe-smudges that are the most visible thing on the screen when right under the sun. The camera seemed to have trouble focusing especially in low-light conditions.

Dainty design

Xoom keeps up with the rivals like the iPad and Asus Transformer TF101 when it comes to a classy design. Although the fascia is just plain glass and a thin bezel, the back panel looks elegant with its anodised aluminium and soft rubberised finish.

The power button lodged in the back panel - sharing a strip with the camera, dual-LED flash and one grille of the stereo speakers – makes for an easy press when you hold the tablet in both hands. You can use your 3G SIM card in the slot created on the top of the tablet, next to the headphone jack. The micro-HDMI slot at the bottom allows you to stream HD content from the tablet onto HD-tellys.

Performance

Xoom runs on a dual-core 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processor. The tablet never froze while I was handling it but once in a while it seemed to be taking it's time to catch up. Running a bunch of apps and widgets in the background seemed to sap the battery quicker than usual. However, the Xoom offered one of the better battery runs we've seen. Constant connection to the Wi-Fi, occasional compulsions to play Angry Birds, checking mails and downloading apps every once in a while, the Xoom gave me company almost throughout my worktime – about 9 hours.

Combing through Honeycomb

It's no surprise that the first device that took to Honeycomb does justice to the system. The user interface may seem, to first time users, a bit of a winding process. But it's not too long before you realise that Honeycomb offers you tons of personalisation and convenient features at hand. A one-touch access to all programmes running at the moment saves you a lot of time. The 10.2-inch gives you enough space to load all your favourite apps on to the screen.

However, all these goodies and more might not, at the moment, completely make up for the dearth of dedicated Honeycomb apps. Motorola wasn't able to comment on exactly how many dedicated apps were available in the Android Market but chances are it has not crossed the 200-mark.

Final word

The Motorola Xoom had the advantage of being the first tablet to be graced by Honeycomb. But despite the head start, there's little that makes it an exclusive tablet to own. The power specs, multi-pixels and memory are something that a handful of other tablets in the market also boast of. However, the superior sound quality and overall entertainment capabilities give the Xoom an extra edge.

Rs 35,590 (3G)

Rs 29,990 (Wi-fi only)

Love – Great sound quality, long battery life

Hate – Not the fastest tablet, average camera

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW