Less than a year later, given what Samsung has done with its Galaxy Tab line of tablets and what Asus was able to triumph with the Transformer Prime, a corporation would be crazy to unharness a pill with specs and options just like the Xoom. Not if it had any affordable expectation of success, that is.
So, as we tend to prepare to enter one more year of regularly advancing technology, the discharge of the Droid Xyboard eight.2 demands the question: did Motorola push the planning, performance, and options of its follow-up to the Xoom so much enough to create it price considering, or is that this a stopgap on the road to one thing way more impressive?
Design
The 8.2-inch version of the Xyboard is, not surprisingly, each thinner and lighter than the ten.1-inch Xoom. it is also lighter than the nine.7-inch iPad a pair of, however Apple's pill remains a hair skinnier.
From the front, the Xyboard sounds like a typical black pill, apart from its corners, that taper inward. the sides are lined with a easy-to-grip rubber material that extends to the rear, till meeting with an aluminum plate. whereas I appreciate the plate's purpose of reinforcing the tablet's integrity whereas conjointly keeping it lightweight, the visible screw heads viewing me from atop the plate created it troublesome to ignore the shoddiness of its implementation.
When held horizontally with the cameras on the left, the Xyboard's right edge is home to one speaker, a Micro-USB port, a Mini-HDMI port, and a door that covers the SIM card slot. On the left edge is another speaker, followed by an infrared sensor, right next to a headphone jack. On the left bezel, midway between the left corners, sits a 1.3-megapixel camera, with a 5-megapixel LED-supported camera placed directly opposite on the rear. like several smaller tablets, inserting the camera directly within the middle like this tends to draw unwanted guest appearances from your fingers in photos and videos. inserting the camera a bit higher or on the highest bezel would have created all the distinction.
The power/lock button and volume rocker don't seem to be solely hidden away on the rear, however are flush with the body of the pill, creating them not solely troublesome to accurately press, however conjointly to search out, while not flipping it around. whereas this solves the matter of accidentally hitting the buttons, it makes planning to them quickly a brand new challenge.
The Xyboard comes with each an influence adapter and a further USB cable, every of that plugs into the Micro-USB port. Most vendors mix the functions of those into one cable, however not therefore here. not like the minimalist pill style, the facility adapter itself is oversize and should need you to create some area for it on your power strip. Thankfully, with the USB cable plugged into a laptop, the battery still charges, albeit at a slower rate. throughout charging, a white LED lightweight begins pulsating within the middle right of the tablet's bezel.
Software options
The Xyboard are upgradable to Ice Cream Sandwich, however ships with Honeycomb three.2 put in, still as a number of custom Motorola and Verizon applications like MotoPack, a curated Motorola app store; MotoCast, that allows you to stream and download movies and photos from your laptop to the Xyboard; and V solid Apps, another curated app store tailored for Verizon devices. V solid Media aggregates all of your media for enjoying in one place, however we tend to could not truly get it to play video from our library.
Unfortunately, so as to sideload files onto the Xyboard, you are needed to 1st install Motorola's MotoCast software on your laptop. solely then can the drivers for your Xyboard be put in. though you've got completely no plans to use MotoCast, you are still forced to put in it. over a minor annoyance.
Like the Samsung Galaxy Tab seven.0 Plus, the Xyboard eight.2 options an infrared sensor and includes a universal remote management app. whereas the Tab seven.0 and used Peel as its remote management software, the Xyboard eight.2's Dijit may be a less sturdy and fewer helpful app.
While setup was easy and simple, the vary on the infrared sensor is severely restricted when using the software, annoyingly topping out at concerning eight feet. we tend to were unable to see whether or not this was a hardware or software issue, however.
Hardware options
The Droid Xyboard eight.2 comes full of all the formerly spectacular pill hardware goodies we tend to currently take without any consideration. These embrace an eight.2-inch IPS capacitive bit screen running at one,280x800-pixel resolution, a 1.2GHz Texas Instruments OMAP 4430 CPU, 1GB of RAM, and 32MB of flash memory storage, with a 16GB version accessible still. The gyroscope, accelerometer, ambient lightweight sensor, Bluetooth a pair of.1 +EDR, and 802.11 b/g/n network adapter spherical out the hardware highlights.
Performance
Navigating Honeycomb on the Xyboard felt responsive, with apps launching quickly. However, having been spoiled by the Asus Transformer Prime's abundant smoother swiping transitions, i could not facilitate however be disappointed by the "framey-ness" apparent here when swiping through app pages. whereas the transition takes place simply as quickly, it's merely not as swish. When making an attempt to open the Gallery and also the movie player, I conjointly experienced some frequent hangs and long pauses that I had to reboot the pill to alleviate.
When surfing the net, swiping through pages was simply as quick; but, when a website loaded, scrolling quickly down a page made severe visible clipping. throughout internet surfing, the CPU, in a shot to not waste time drawing content nobody will see, can solely draw the assets on the screen. something not currently on the screen are drawn after you scroll to it. sadly, if you scroll too quickly you will see assets being drawn in because the pill makes an attempt to stay up together with your scrolling speed. this is often common across several Honeycomb tablets.
Riptide GP, a jet ski game accessible from the Android Market, is nice for comparing pill GPU performance. not like Shadowgun, that appears to cap its frame rate, Riptide truly scales, and reckoning on the speed of the processor running it, the game's frame rate are noticeably smoother or choppier.
However, in our tests, despite the fact that the Xyboard contains a slightly faster one.2GHz OMAP 4430 whereas the Tab eight.9 contains a 1GHz Tegra a pair of, there wasn't a plain distinction in frame rate. Though not "low," the frame rate did not begin to approach the high levels of the sport running on the iPad a pair of or Transformer Prime.
The Xyboard's 5-megapixel rear camera took detailed still photos that compared favorably with similar shots taken with the Tab eight.9's 3-megapixel camera. The Xyboard's photos were sharp and clear, with sensible color replica. Shutter speed was fairly fast still.
The Xyboard's captured 720p video was swish with a lot of correct color than I got from the Tab eight.9, that tended to oversaturate the movie with an abundance of red.
Verizon's LTE network 4G speeds were impressively fast; I downloaded a 19MB app in twenty two seconds, whereas an equivalent file took sixteen seconds on Wi-Fi. Even with the pill idle and 4G off, the battery perceived to drain lots faster than for a typical pill with 4G on.
Conclusion
There are lots of selections for pill shoppers these days. The lower-end 7-inchers just like the Kindle fireplace and Nook pill provide pretty controlled Android experiences however high out at $250. The iPad a pair of and Transformer Prime provide a premium pill expertise that starts at $500.
Verizon offers the Xyboard eight.2 beginning at $430, however that is given that you check in for a two-year contract. Off contract, expect costs to begin at $600, and that is for the 16GB version. It's extraordinarily troublesome for us to advocate such a deal when higher selections exist. The Transformer Prime for $500 gets you 32GB of storage and a faster, quad-core CPU, in an exceedingly way more thoughtfully designed package.
However, if you are willing to procure 4G speeds on a pill, they're undoubtedly quick here. Still, with technology advancing as quickly because it is, does one really need to urge roped into a two-year contract in an exceedingly still-nascent market?
The Motorola Droid Xyboard eight.2 is not a nasty product in itself, however the pricing structure makes it not possible for us to advocate. There are higher choices out there, with a lot of returning soon.
Motorola DROID Xyboard eight.2 Specs
General:
AKA:?
Released:09/12/2011
Form Factor:Slate
Hardware Keyboard:No
Size
Width:8.50 inches
Height:5.47 inches
Depth:0.35 inches
Weight:13.62 ounces
Display
Type:Capacitive
Technology:IPS LCD
Size:8.2 inches
Resolution:1280x800px
Camera
Megapixels:5 MP
Autofocus:Yes
Flash:LED
Megapixels:5 MP
Video Quality:720p
Video FPS:30
Secondary Camera(Front Facing)
Megapixels:1.3 MP
Autofocus:?
Flash:?
Video Quality:?
Connectivity
Bluetooth:Bluetooth two.1
Bluetooth Types:EDR
USB:MicroUSB
Wifi:802.11b/g/n
GPS:Yes
GPS Types:aGPS
Multimedia
Headset Jack:3.5mm
Speakerphone:?
FM Tuner:?
Browser:?
Battery
Type:Li-Ion
Capacity:3960 mAh
Removable:No
OS
Version:Android 3.2
Custom UI:?
Hardware
Internal Memory:16,32 GB
External Memory:No
RAM:1 GB
Processor:TI
Processor Speed:1.2 GHz
