Motorola officially announces Xoom tablet

The Gadget Show  Thursday 06 January 2011

Give it a name: the Xoom is now official

Motorola’s long-awaited Android Honeycomb tablet is finally here – having taken its CES bow right on cue – and will be known as the Xoom.

The Xoom was first shown off in prototype form by Google when it launched Android Gingerbread a month or so ago, but it’s of course the next full release of Android – version 3.0 Honeycomb – that’s on duty in the final version, or at least it will be once the Xoom lands worldwide towards the end of the first quarter.

It has a compelling hardware spec sheet too: a 10.1in touchscreen with a video-friendly 1280×800 resolution is backed by Nvidia’s Tegra 2 processor. In what is quickly becoming the standard Honeycomb template, a 5-megapixel camera is paired with a 2-megapixel front-facing partner for video calls, while 32GB of on-board storage should be enough to keep you busy for a bit, with an SD card slot on hand when that runs out.

Returning to that video-friendly screen, the Xoom can capture 720p footage and will have no issues rendering 1080p footage either thanks to that Tegra 2 processor. All of which will come in handy when viewing that Flash content your iPad-owning friends can’t watch natively…