Well the Xoom is finally available for consumers to purchase at your local Verizon store or Best Buy. I was lucky enough to be able to attend CES 2011, and got to view the Xoom in action. We didn't get hands on, but did get to see what the Xoom was capable of doing. Honeycomb OS looks great for the tablet, but after trying the instore demo at Best Buy for a few hours, I can see that Honeycomb was a bit rushed out. This could be that Motorola wanted the Xoom out the door, since you do have to send back your Xoom to get it upgraded to LTE when the upgrade is available at no cost. You do have to wait 6 days for you to get your Xoom back.
The build quality of the Xoom, is very good all around. It does have a really glossy screen, but as I used it and tried several apps, Internet, etc... it didn't bother me at all. Maybe I am use to my iPad glossy screen. The speed is very quick and response to clicks and taps quickly with the Tegra 2 processor. The specs on the Xoom are very similar as the Motorola Atrix that I am testing out. The camera was very quick to snap pictures and they were very clear, consider from a 5-megapixel camera with dual flash. The front facing camera was also good, not great, but good enough. I wouldn't be taking pictures with the front facing camera to save to print out. I opened up the book app and scrolled through pages, and went back to home screen leaving several apps running, didn't notice any slow down. Of course I can't really compare it unless I actually had the device with me for a day. I did open several web pages and everything opened up good and scrolled very smooth with no lag.
If you really want to get ahead of the game with the hardware, the Xoom is a good start. Honeycomb needs some work, but can be a contender very soon. I would have to test the Xoom for a longer period of time to really say whether I would really get one, to replace my Samsung Galaxy Tab. For now my Galaxy Tab is with me at all times for work.
