Motorola has been keeping its cards close to its chest with details on its upcoming droid tablets. However today they broke their silence confirming two new additions to its tablet family, with the new Xoom 2 and Xoom 2 Media Edition.
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Both tablets carry ballsy innards including a 1.2GHz dual core processor, 1 GB of RAM and 16GB of internal memory. According to GSMArena, the tablets will be made available as WiFi only models at first.
As you’d expect they’re both running Android’s Honeycomb operating system, (specifically version 3.2) with Motorola keeping their lips sealed on an Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade. From here on the two tabs begin to differ.
The Xoom 2 is directly related to the original Xoom, using the same and adorned Corning Gorilla Glass to cover its 10.1 inch 1280 x 800 display. Keeping the original Xoom’s specs is a good thing, and so is dropping the weight down by 131 grams, resulting in a 4mm drop in width.
They weight has come at the expense of camera gear, with it using the same 5MP camera as its predecessor, albeit with the downgrading single LED flash. The front camera is also a casualty of bulimia, with it being reduced from 2 megapixels to 1.3.
The Media Edition packs the same processing prowess, screen resolution and rear camera into a smaller physique, with it proving a noteworthy competitor amidst other 8.9 inch tablets. Thanks to a thinner battery it fits into skin less than 9mm thick, but will still deliver 6 hours of web browsing and roughly half a week of music playback. The slim down internals also help it weigh a light 386 grams.
The orgy of specs working together in these tablets make them a worthy Samsung rival, who currently offer similar specification Android tabs and up until now have been the only vendor to offer(-ish) a competitive alternative to Apple’s iPad.
Best of all though, these Xoom tablets side step the design aesthetics akin to Apple’s iPad, largely resembling the new Motorola Razr. This already gives Moto a step up against Samsung who have been pummelled by Apple related litigation resulting in their Galaxy products being benched in some countries.
So far no release dates have been made available yet, but when these bad boys hit the market they’ll generate loads of buzz.
