Motorola Xoom Hands-On at CES

Brad Molen  By on 06 Jan 11

Greetings from Las Vegas, everyone! This is Brad reporting from CES, as I wander the halls of the massively huge Las Vegas Convention Center. Today was press day, the big day in which all the major announcements are typically made, and I certainly spent a lot of time going back and forth to see as much as I could.

The Motorola press conference was one of the most eagerly anticipated moments of CES for me, as I was hoping to see the might-as-well-already-be-official Motorola Xoom tablet that was leaked all over the place. And certainly it did not disappoint. Amongst a few other key devices such as the Cliq 2, Atrix 4G and Droid Bionic, which we’ll cover soon, the Xoom was the most prominent.

Though I mostly had to admire the Xoom from afar, I was given some brief time to handle the new Motorola tablet. Just holding the tablet it felt incredibly solid in my hands, with a soft rubber backing, curved sides that make the Xoom even thinner than the iPad (12.9 mm at the middle compared to 13.4 mm), and large 10.1″ screen that did a very good job of using up as much real estate as possible. It felt ridiculously large, but when I saw some demos of the Xoom in action, I didn’t seem to mind as much. But keep in mind, it is not going to be as “portable” as the Galaxy Tab is. This thing definitely won’t be fitting in a large pants or coat pocket.

We weren’t allowed to check out much on the Xoom because the honeycomb isn’t completely done yet; it’s still in testing and there are still plenty of bugs to work out before the Xoom’s Q1 2011 release, so we were limited to essentially 5-6 prepared demo videos of what certain apps would look like on the Xoom. Check out the video below to see these demos. Still, what I saw was rather impressive. The specs alone are enough to cause anyone to drool, but then seeing and handling the tablet are certain to do more so.

For now the Xoom will be launched on Verizon’s 3G network, but is upgradeable to LTE 4G whenever the time comes.

And for drooling purposes, here are the specs:

It may be some time before we get our hands on a Xoom again (I have a feeling we won’t be seeing it at the Motorola booth since the software isn’t completely finished) but at least we were able to get some video footage of it in action, as well as a few pictures. Enjoy!

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  • Brau

    It looks great, except for the lag. Every stroke is delayed. Considering it’s dual core, they better solve that issue or it’s a big flop no matter how nice it looks.

  • http://www.staska.net Staska

    It’s not a lag from the strokes. Honeycomb on XOOM is not ready, so they
    just played videos to show features.

    No actual touch gestures in that hands-on demo were real, except for
    touching the video thumbnail and play button. I guess a guy could have
    rehearsed more so his pseudo touches look more natural :)

  • http://toptechnologytoday.blogspot.com DigitalNomad

    It seems the Xoom may have some problems launching, its supposed to be out the first quarter of 2011, but due to the recent fall backs there having with the processor and such Im not sure if this will happen, we will just have to wait and see?!

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