Review: Moto Xoom vs. iPad2

[any ANONYMOUS forum user]

With the recent releases of the first Honeycomb tablet - the Motorola Xoom and Apple's second-gen iPad 2, the tablet computer landscape is finally starting to get interesting. Motorola Xoom has became a powerful rival to iPad 2. In fact, the Motorola Xoom and the Apple iPad are very similar with regard to basic hardware design and functionality. When you break it down, the iPad 2 trounces the Xoom in almost every category. That’s not to say that the Xoom isn’t a really good tablet, but unfortunately the iPad 2 manages to wipe the floor with it in everything from design to performance. That said, the Xoom can still find itself many happy homes with Android enthusiasts. Anyway, let us learn more about them.

Motorola Xoom is an Android-based tablet computer by Motorola, first tablet to run Google’s Android 3.0 Honeycomb. The Xoom has two cameras. One is a front-facing 2.0 megapixel camera for video chat. The 5.0-megapixel camera on the back is for photos and will take 720p HD video. It captures video in 720p, and the video can be edited in the editing app, Movie Studio. While not as intuitive as iMovie, Movie Studio works fine, and the video quality from the Xoom generally looks better. The Xoom tablet technically offers a more powerful, more capable alternative to Apple's iPad with Google's next generation of Android, Motorola's knack for great hardware, and Verizon's promise of 4G network compatibility. Moreover, with its 10.1-inch HD widescreen display at 1280x800 resolutions, you could enjoy HD video in the thin and light tablet with ease. It will also play Adobe Flash, so web videos are viewable. Below are the formats playable for the Motorola Xoom: H.264, H.263, MPEG-4, MP3, AAC, ACC+ Enhanced, OGG, MIDI, AMR NB, and AAC+. But if you just have some videos in other formats, like MKV, VOB, AVI, FLV, WMA, etc, and want to play them with your new Motorola Xoom, The video converter is the only way you can choose to convert these formats or other unsupported videos to the Xoom playable format at first and then put the converted movies on the Xoom for playback. Also, DVD movies are not supported with Xoom unless you make DVD rips.

Apple iPad 2 is the second generation of the iPad designed by Apple Inc. It serves primarily as a platform for audio-visual media including books, periodicals, movies, music, games, and web content. Its size and weight fall between those of contemporary smart phones and laptop computers. The possibility of an SD Card slot is mentioned, but not confirmed, but the report notes iPad 2 will have two cameras, but with components shared with iPad touch, rather than the higher quality iPhone 4 cameras. The cameras on the iPad 2 are as well as an improvement over no cameras at all in the first iPad, but that's about it. The front facing, VGA-quality camera shoots low-resolution footage that's fine for video chats, but the rear-facing camera offers less than a megapixel of resolution. Stretch those images across the iPad's 9.7-inch screen and you are looking at some pretty grainy, noisy shots. Only very bright lighting improves things. The iPad 2 shoots 720p video, which looks higher quality than the photos it shoots, but is still no replacement for the footage a typical point-and-shoot can capture. However, iPad 2 still plays achingly few video formats as well as Motorola Xoom. You have to convert your favorite videos to iPad 2 format.