Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Cah Pacing
The new kid on the block might be Ice Cream Sandwich, but Honeycomb tablets will continue to appear for a while yet. Motorola was an Android Honeycomb pioneer, way, way back at the start of 2011 with the Xoom, and Motorola have now launched a successor in the form of the Xybpard, produced to an 8.2-inch form factor. We won’t refer to it as the Xoom 2, since strictly speaking that title belongs to the 10.1-inch version. In the US the Motorola Xyboard features LTE, and with a two-year contract the 16GB model costs $430, while the 32GB version will set you back $530.
As things stand, in the realm of premium tablets, the Asus Transformer Prime is the newly-crowned king, so that will be our main point of comparison here. Compared to the old Xoom, the Xyboard 8.2 is more slender, weighs less and is generally superior in design, even if it continues the murky, industrial theme of its predecessor. To emphasize the point, a metal plate on the tab’s rear is held firmly in place by six exposed screws, while the raised rubberized area surrounding that plate gives the Xyboard a novel contrast of textures and depth, adding style and making the tablet very agreeable to handle. It compares very favorably with the cold, hard metal of the Transformer Prime or iPad 2, although the Xyboard is slightly thicker than those two, swelling to 0.35 inches at its thickest point. It doesn’t weigh much for all that – at 0.85 pounds (386g) it’s considerably lighter than the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9.
Button placement hasn’t improved between the generations – just as on the Xoom, when held in portrait orientation the Power button and now the volume rocker sit unnervingly close to your index finger, leading to the occasional accidental presses. The left and right edges of the tablet are socket-free, and an IR blaster sits dead-centre above the display, flanked by the headphone jack and one of the two speakers. No doubt that IR will be useful for TV remote control, but Motorola might have included some software to get us started. The other speaker is situated down below, with micro-HDMI and micro-USB sockets, together with the LTE micro SIM slot, concealed behind a suspiciously flimsy port cover.
The 8.2-inch, 1280 x 800 LCD screen gives good brightness and contrast, with excellent viewing angles, but obviously is no match for Samsung’s Super AMOLED Plus displays. A 720p video-enabled 5MP rear camera is teamed with an LED flash, and out front the Xyboard features a 1.3MP snapper, next to an LED light which will alert you to any waiting messages. With the rear cam the Motorola Xyboard 8.2 managed very decent video capture, although sudden movements outdoors could lead to temporary washing-out. Colours were ever so slightly muted, but for $500 buyers shouldn’t expect TV-quality footage.
The raw specs for the Xyboard are a 1.2GHz dualcore TI OMAP processor with 1GB RAM, which two months ago would have been quite impressive…however we have now entered the era of the Transformer Prime, and any shortfall in specs must be made up for by user experience.
As with every other Honeycomb tablet, the Xyboard stutters from time to time whilst browsing, and while apps launch quicker and games run smoother than with the Xoom, amnd even though HD video playback is problem-free but browsing can be sluggish here and there. Forgetting the Transformer Prime, benchmarks scores are decent, though for sheer number-crunching ability (and by extension heavy applications and gaming) the Xyboard falls down, especially now the quadcore Prime has raised the bar. A very decent tablet, but it has to be measured against the competition. For slickness, the iPad 2 is still on the podium, and for sheer processing gumption, the Transformer Prime is a far better buy, even for a few dollars more.
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