Motorola Xoom 2 review

The original Motorola Xoom was the first of the Android tablets, and had to bear the huge expectations of a fledgling industry. Alas, when it finally arrived, it couldn’t live up to the hype. If anything, the rush to be first was its undoing, as several more polished Android tablets bettered it only weeks later. So Motorola has taken its time to follow up the Xoom with a thinner and lighter sequel, and that patience looks to have paid dividends.

The Xoom 2 is only 8.8mm thick and weighs 599g – both almost identical to the iPad 2 – and its corners are angled gently downwards, both to stop them digging into your palms and to give the tablet a very slight octagonal shape. It gives the Xoom 2 a distinctive look that won widespread approval in the PC Pro office; in a neat touch, the packaging has its corners chopped off to match.
The rear is made of grey aluminium in the centre, but with rubberised grip areas at either side and along the bottom, so it’s comfortable to hold. The only buttons are concealed round the back, just where your right-hand fingertips are likely to rest. It isn’t too bad once you’re used to it, but changing the volume or waking the Xoom 2 from sleep can be a bit awkward as you grope blindly for the right button.

Still, it keeps the front clean and leaves the 10.1in display to soak up all the attention. It’s a 1,280 x 800 TFT whose bright and crisp picture leaps out at you. We measured the maximum brightness at a searing 478cd/m². Combine that with a decent 800:1 contrast ratio and it’s certainly among the better tablet screens we’ve used. Its colours don’t quite have the vibrancy of the iPad 2 or Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, but viewed alone it won’t let any app or game down.
There’s a 1.3-megapixel webcam above the screen, and a 5-megapixel camera around the back that can also capture 720p video. Using Honeycomb’s camera app we took a range of test shots and videos, and the results were generally pretty good. It captured a good level of detail in a variety of lighting conditions, although shots were a little washed out and colours lacked punch. There’s also no tap-to-focus, which can be irritating with close-up shots.
The Xoom’s internals are very impressive. It has a 1.2GHz Nvidia Tegra chip and 1GB of RAM, but we were a little put off by the Xoom 2’s initial sluggishness in menus. After a few hours to bed in, though, the juddering vanished, leaving a very capable tablet in its wake. It handled the most demanding games we threw at it without a hitch, including the cutting-edge ShadowGun, and raced through the Android benchmarks: it scored a healthy 1,779 in the Quadrant test, and took 1,931ms to complete the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, both of which are among the fastest we’ve seen.
Motorola has squeezed an impressive battery inside that svelte chassis as well. We set it running our usual tablet benchmark – with Wi-Fi off, medium brightness and a video clip running on loop – and the Xoom 2 lasted for 10hrs 54mins before conking out. It can’t match the ludicrous stamina of an iPad 2, and it’s disappointingly down from the 12hrs 49mins of the original Xoom, but it’s still longer than any other Android tablet we’ve tested.

Although we’re all eagerly awaiting Ice Cream Sandwich, the Xoom 2 is still on Android 3.2 just now, but it’s among the first tablets to benefit from Google’s new tiled Android Market interface. It’s a vast improvement, with plenty of room for staff and editors’ recommendations, and the ability to properly promote new and popular apps in a way that looks far more modern than before.
As for other bundled software, you get a link to an app called Dijit, which works in conjunction with the discreet IR emitter on the top edge to control TVs and other living room equipment. The setup and control is similar to that on Sony’s Tablet S. If you’d prefer, there’s also a micro-HDMI output on the bottom to hook up a TV directly. Motorola’s MotoCast app lets you easily stream media from a PC or laptop, and if you’re after a tablet more for business use, Motorola has also included Citrix Receiver and GoToMeeting. There’s even an optional stylus for jotting down quick notes and sketches.

If it all sounds rosy, we do have a few concerns. We reviewed the 16GB model, but there doesn’t appear to be a larger capacity version just yet. There are microSD and SIM slots under a flap on the bottom edge, but both have been filled in to prevent use – presumably we’ll eventually see a 3G Xoom 2, but blocking your route to additional storage is a baffling decision from Motorola. We’re also a little disappointed to see Motorola pricing the Xoom 2 at iPad 2 levels, with this 16GB model costing £400 inc VAT.
That leaves us in a quandary. This is undeniably the most physically desirable Android tablet we’ve yet used, but is it a better all-round choice than the excellent Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1? It’s a very close call, but with similar prices, we’d argue the faster internals, superb ergonomics and IR emitter just about make the Xoom 2 our Android tablet of choice. The bigger question is whether you should be buying at all right now: with the first quad-core models due soon, the new champion could be knocked off the top before you’ve even unwrapped it.