Motorola Droid Xyboard 10.1 Tablet

Motorola Droid Xyboard 10.1 (Verizon Wireless)

Pros

Integrated LTE. Good looking.

Cons

Very expensive for what you get. No memory card slot. Poor Mac compatibility. Verizon's app store is awful.

Bottom Line

The Motorola Xyboard 10.1 is outpaced by other Honeycomb Android tablets which cost less.

The Motorola Xyboard 10.1 is not quite enough tablet, for too much money. While it's much more handsome than the Xoom tablet it replaces, the Xyboard can't overcome its high price or Google Android Honeycomb's ongoing trouble with third-party apps.

Physical Design and Pricing

Slim at 10 by 6.8 by .35 inches, the Xyboard comes with a soft-touch back and slightly cropped corners, like something out of "Battlestar Galactica." The front is dominated by the 10.1-inch, 1,280-by-800-pixel screen; it's not that bright, but has very rich colors and blacks. At 1.33 pounds, it weighs the same as the iPad 2 ($499-$829, 4.5 stars), which is an average weight for a tablet this size.

The Power button and Volume rocker, along with the main 5-megapixel camera and stereo speakers, are on the back panel; there's a VGA camera on the front. The battery isn't removable, and there's no memory card slot, so the whole thing feels like a single, solid, seamless slab. It's classy, to be sure.

Pricing is a problem here. There are three models of the Xyboard 10.1, with 16GB, 32GB and 64GB storage (and our 32GB unit only had 26GB of free storage, so you aren't getting quite what's advertised). They cost $529, $629, and $729, with two-year contracts, or $699, $799, and $899 without, respectively.

The superior 32GB Asus eee Pad Transformer Prime (4 stars), paired with a Novatel 4G hotspot, costs $549 with a two-year contract, $80 less than the Xyboard. With no contract the bundle costs $768, still less than the Xyboard. The 32GB Verizon iPad 2, costs $729 without a contract, $70 less than the Xyboard. The Xyboard 10.1's little brother, the Xyboard 8.2, which we're currently testing, costs $100 less for 16 and 32GB models (there is no 64GB option), but that tablet is competing with even less-expensive 7-inch models. Major pricing fail.

For the Xyboard to be worth the premium, it needs to deliver something more compelling than those two tablets. It doesn't.

OS and Apps

The Xyboard runs Android 3.2. Motorola promises an upgrade to the new version 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich," which may improve the user experience, but we'll count that blessing once we've seen it happen.

It's hard to find good apps for Google's Android Honeycomb tablet OS, but here, Verizon has actually managed to make the problem worse. The carrier adds its own V Cast app store to the Xyboard, which you'd assume would spotlight top-quality tablet apps.

But no! Not only is V Cast Apps sluggish and painful to use, it sells subpar apps that look lousy on the Xyboard. I downloaded two big-name games from major publisher Glu Mobile. "Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock" had grotesquely jaggy, low-res graphics clearly designed for smaller screens. "Toyshop Adventures Premium" shows font spacing and kerning problems, revealing it was written without tablets in mind. Motorola tries to pitch in with a tablet-oriented showcase called MotoPack, but it has only six apps in it.

Meanwhile, Google's Android Market also continues to fail to deliver tablet-optimized apps. Searching for Twitter and Facebook—two of the biggest names on the Internet—give you apps designed for tiny 320-by-480 screens, with oddly huge buttons and lots of wasted space on a tablet display. While Google spotlights a few dozen apps in its "recommended for tablets" section, it's a pretty thin selection.

Samsung, with its new store on the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus ($399, 3.5 stars), and Nvidia, with Tegra Zone, are both trying to work around the Android Market's flaws by offering good apps through tablet-oriented stores. Verizon just makes Honeycomb's problems worse.

Verizon and Motorola add some bloatware. The most interesting is MotoCast, an Orb-like way to stream media and files from your PC to your tablet over a network, but the QuickOffice HD office app is welcome. The Dijit smart remote-control app uses the Xyboard's built-in IR emitter to turn the tablet into a universal remote control, but it had the usual problems these kinds of apps do: it couldn't control either my TiVo or my WDTV Live HD set-top box properly.

For some reason, Motorola includes a stylus with the Xyboard. There's a little icon in the status bar to pop up Evernote or a Motorola-designed notepad app on command, but I found these apps too sluggish to be usable.

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