Meet Xoom, iPad's First Big Challenger

Critics agree: Motorola’s Xoom is the iPad’s the first serious competition. But the base price of $800 could scare customers away:

• Xoom “has a more potent processor than the current iPad; front and rear cameras versus none for the iPad; better speakers; and higher screen resolution,” writes Walt Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal. But the “the iPad has way more tablet-specific apps,” and “in my tests, much better battery life.”

• Writing for CNET, Donald Bell warns that “the price is high, and Google still has some work to do before its tablet software experience is as fleshed out and intuitive as Apple's.”
• Xoom’s processor “is lightning fast and most activities took seconds,” writes John Biggs at CrunchGear. But “if you open too many apps, it slows down to a crawl.”
• Google’s Honeycomb operating system, a version of Android, “proves to be intuitive and flexible, raising the likelihood that the Xoom is just the first of what will be a wave of capable Android-based tablets,” notes Rich Jaroslovsky at Bloomberg.

(More Motorola stories.)