Veriznowireless

As you may have noticed, tablets are all the rage right now. With Apple’s announcement of the iPad 2 today, the competition is really starting to heat up. One of Apple’s biggest rivals right now is the Motorola Xoom tablet that hit the shelves last week. Today my demo unit finally arrived thanks to the fine folks over at Verizon. So in the tradition of new electronics, here is my official unboxing.

Sure you’ve seen everyone from Engadget to CNET’s review on the product, but this one is for all the Cincinnatians who would like a home town review. Check out the pictures of the Xoom in the slide show to the right.

As I pulled the Motorola Xoom from the packaging the first thing I noticed was how solid the device felt. I was half expecting a flimsy, plastic feel. It is easy to tell that Motorola built this thing to last. It had a tough metal feel to it, although I’m pretty sure the casing is all plastic. The screen for certain is glass and certainly doesn’t look like it would work well in the light. The solid build also shows itself in the weight of the Xoom too. I could see this being a problem if trying to read for a long period of time.

It wasn’t too hard to figure out how to turn on, as there is only one button besides the clearly marked volume buttons. Once unlocked, it brings you to a home screen. It was not exactly what I expected being an Android phone owner, but I was able to quickly figure out the navigation buttons on the bottom left. Notifications show up on the bottom right next to the clock instead of at the top with an Android smart phone. It does include 5 home screen for you to fill up with apps and shortcuts, plus the familiar app try where all your apps are stored.

If you’ve used any short of touch screen device before, this should be a quick pick up for you. If not they do provide a handy “Master Your Device” booklet that points you in the right direction.

The Honeycomb UI is much more polished than the Froyo 2.2.1 version of vanilla Android I have running on my original Droid. The animations were much smoother the “holographic” effects (as Google calls them) certainly were pleasing to the eye. But to anyone who has ever used Compiz Fusion on Linux will not be overly impressed.

So far, I’ve only played with the preinstalled apps, like YouTube, G-mail, Google Maps, and so on. I really do like the YouTube interface and the G-mail client is much better than my Droid.

The camera on the back is 5MP and they claim that it does HD video. I can say that the picture and video quality on the device are amazing. I’d share with you but Examiner.com limits us to small files when up-loading images and videos, so they wouldn’t do it justice. There is an HDMI output on the device, but it does not include the cable for it.

I have been fairly skeptical about tablets so far. They seem like really awesome toys, but I don’t see them working as a main device that could replace my desktop computer or even my Cr-48 laptop. They seem like really big smart phones to me.

Since this is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to really sit down with a tablet device, I’m going to put this guy through the paces. For the next two weeks I will carry the Motorola Xoom with me as often as I can (I don’t own it, so I won’t take it everywhere) and try to see if it could be more than just a toy or novel device. I will give the apps, games, and Verizon network a good work through around Cincinnati. So go ahead and hit the subscribe link at the top of the page. That way you can get update info on the Xoom is doing as well as other possibly insightful articles.