Motorola Xoom tablet

Greetings from Las Vegas, everyone! The Motorola press conference was one of the most eagerly anticipated moments of CES for me, as I was hoping to see the might-as-well-already-be-official Motorola Xoom tablet that was leaked all over the place. Though I mostly had to admire the Xoom from afar, I was given some brief time to handle the new Motorola tablet. It felt ridiculously large, but when I saw some demos of the Xoom in action, I didn’t seem to mind as much. Check out the video below to see these demos. For now the Xoom will be launched on Verizon’s 3G network, but is upgradeable to LTE 4G whenever the time comes.

Though there have been tablets running Android on the market since last year, the Motorola Xoom, debuted today at CES in Las Vegas for the very first time, represents the first real Android tablet sanctioned by Google, running an operating system designed explicitly for tablets. Forget the Samsung Galaxy Tab, forget it completely. The device has a 10-inch widescreen display and is actually a hair thinner than an iPad: Xoom measures 12.9mm at the middle while the iPad measures 13.4 mm. In a preview video, they zipped through many screens of Android 3.0 aka Honeycomb, the Google tablet OS. Highlights include a powerful multi-tab full-screen Chrome browser with Adobe Flash support (unlike the iPad), a full-screen Gmail with a sleek modern look and lots of space for previewing emails, and a Google Books app that lets you swipe through your books. I believe the Chrome tabbed browsing experience will be a key part of the Honeycomb life.
The iPad is a vessel for great development.

Next up, the Motorola DROID BIONIC 4G smartphone featuring a 4.3-inch qHD touch screen display (plays for 1080p HD content), Android 2.3 Gingerbread, 1 GHz dual-core processor, VGA front-facing camera (video calls over Wi-Fi / 4G), 8 MP rear-facing camera  Adobe Flash Player and HTML5 support, 512 MB of RAM, support for Wi-Fi/ 3G / 4G / Bluetooth / GPS connectivity and Mirror Mode streaming (plays on TV & device simultaneously).