Motorola Xoom Review: The First Honeycomb Tablet Arrives
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 23, 2011 11:57 PM ESTBattery Life
Motorola specs the Xoom at up to 10 hours of battery life, very similar to what Apple suggests the iPad can manage. Motorola sampled reviewers with the Xoom just two days ago and thus I haven’t had a tremendous amount of time to run through our entire suite of battery life tests, what I do have for you are two numbers that generally support Motorola’s rating.
The first is the Xoom running through the same 3G web browsing test we put all of our smartphones through:
At 9.5 hours, the Xoom will easily last you throughout a workday even if you’re browsing the web the entire time and not actually doing work.
The second test is actually a test I put together for our original iPad review. Take our web browsing battery life test, add music playback and email downloading in the background and you’ve got a heavier workload on WiFi:
The number is almost identical - about 9.5 hours for the Xoom on WiFi with some additional tasks running in the background. I’m going to be running some more battery life tests on the Xoom but based on these results I’d say despite the performance advantage, you don’t sacrifice any battery life vs the iPad.
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Impulses - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
Wow, it loads pages three to eight times faster than the iPad? I didn't realize Tegra 2 was THAT much faster. Did you run that same page load test during the Atrix review? I must've glossed over it.Impulses - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
Preview rather.dcollins - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
It's a combination of Tegra 2 and Chrome being much faster than Safari. I would assume Chrome for Android 3.0 was optimized even more heavily than Chrome for Windows, which remains the performance leader on the desktop.samirsshah - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
make that your SD Card reader SDXC rather than SDHC and just like that utility of Zoom increase twofold because you can store more media. Rumor has it that Apple is going SDXC in their new MacBooks.Impulses - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
SDHC should be good for most people's needs, they go up to at least 64GB no? I mean, even 32GB is a lot of music... Judging by MP3 player sales most people don't care to bring their entire collection of music with them, and if you're at home there's plenty of streaming solutions (or even if you aren't).Impulses - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
I like the intro... I also feel that at these prices tablets are a little bit too much of a luxury item for anyone that has or needs a laptop. For those of us, the tablet's still a third or fourth device (behind phone, laptop/netbook, and possibly a desktop); and at $800 I simply can't justify it. I'd rather upgrade one of my other devices. For people with just a desktop or a heavy desktop replacement laptop I imagine that tablets hold a higher appel, particularly if the don't need a portable system for work/study.Impulses - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
Honeycomb is certainly an impressive release tho, given how quickly after Gingerbread it arrived (had obviously been in the works way earlier)... I'm excited to see where future wifi only models fall. If they sold it at $500 or under with 16gb or even 8gb and no 3g radio they'd fly off the shelves... But just like when the iPad first arrived, I think Moto is well aware they have a superior product so they can charge whatever they want for now.Enormously Hatworthy - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
There's a wifi only 16GB version of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 on the way. Pricing for the 16GB 3G version looks to be around €699 so that could come down to €599 without the 3G radio.Plus it'll have Samsung's screen tech and it weighs a quarter of a pound less than the iPad.
Sounds like a winner to me.
Enormously Hatworthy - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
Oh and if you have the pleasure of owning one of Samsung's newer wifi enabled TVs, you'll be able to stream live tv to your Tablet.Unfortunately I don't have the pleasure :(
mcnabney - Saturday, February 26, 2011 - link
And by purchasing Samsung, you can forget about getting updated to 3.1 or 3.2.