MWC 2011: Hands-on with the Motorola Xoom tablet

Anyone covering games at this year’s Mobile World Congress will have been hard-pressed avoiding Motorola’s recently announced Xoom tablet.

Everywhere from the games on the Google Stand to behind closed doors with developers, the device has become synonymous with top-of-the-range Android games at the event, thanks mainly to it being the first tablet ready to ship with the Nvidia Tegra 2 chipset.

But a chip does not make the machine, as no-one ever says, so we went hands-on with the device to find out if it lives up to its phonetic name.

In keeping with all the new Honeycomb devices demonstrated at the show, the Motorola Xoom both comes with no physical buttons on the front and a vanilla version of the Android 3.0 operating system, complete with new bottom task bar.

It’s a heavy slab of a tablet, weighing in at around the same heft as the iPad, but using a 16:10 picture format rather than 4:3 to ensure images display at 16:9 without losing the bottom bar.

The bottom of the device hides a variety of connections that should make all owners of that previously mentioned tablet jealous – a standard USB and HDMI out, capable of outputting to 720p.

Android fans eagerly awaiting the next version of their favourite OS are in for a treat (apologies), as Honeycomb looks to be a significant step-up from Gingerbread in every possible way, except possibly that it makes the Xoom look a little like an expensive alarm clock on the initial home page, which features a giant clock.

With slick handling of multitasking and menu navigation using the bottom bar, not to mention the ‘calming blue’ glow of the default colour scheme, it looks expensive, clean, and intuitive.

There did seem to be disparity between what was running and what the settings menu said was running, which was a little baffling, but switching tasks was swift and flawless.

The OS may be well put together and far more user-friendly than Froyo running on the original Galaxy Tab, but it’s in the range of games where the Xoom really excels.

None of the titles I saw running at the event was a straight iOS port, thanks no doubt to both the increased power and Nvidia’s strong support for games development (“very good”, “great” and “excellent” being the words used by developers I talked to at the event).

Extra visual bells and whistles such as real-time reflections in Backbreaker or three times more incidental detail in Samurai 2: Vengeance may not induce owners of the games to throw away their iPhones or iPads, but they do nicely demonstrate the gap opening up between the current Android generation and the previous Apple devices.

Whether this extra power and selection of games will persuade people to part with a rumoured $800 is another matter entirely. We’ll find out how true that rumour is in a few weeks, when the Xoom goes on sale in the US.