Tablets That Could Take Down the iPad 2
A year ago, Apple started the whole tablet revolution with the iPad. From that point onwards till now, there have been many competitive tablets released in the market, but none seem to match up to the iPad. These 'iPad-killers' came with a feature or two that excelled; stuff like dual-cameras, a pocketable design or even the ability to make phone-calls. But the iPad's optimized Interface worked in its favor, while the rest ran Android 2.x, which was designed with smaller smartphone screens in mind. Thus these assassins failed to make a killing, and the iPad - despite its flaws - still thrives.
But things may take a dramatic change this year, especially after CES 2011 last week. Many of those awe-inspiring tablets that were only seen through the eyes of a blurry camera lens', came out of their closet and flaunted themselves. Many of these have some serious hardware and software that will not only easily challenge the ability of the current iPad, but should also serve a tough fight to the iPad 2, which is speculated to be officially unveiled in February. If you're planning to purchase a tablet this year, please consider the following points.
Motorola XOOM
The first Tablet running Android's codename Honeycomb OS was shown off in its prototype stages not too long ago. Today, we know it as the Motorola XOOM, the first tablet to run Google's "Made for Tablets" version of Android. From what we've seen of the new User Interface, the changes are major and nicely done.
But it is not just the software that Motorola can boast about with the XOOM. Although it shares the same 10-inch screen size of the iPad, the XOOM follows a wide-screen aspect ratio, which is better suited for watching videos. Its resolution is also higher than the current iPad (at a healthy 1280 x 800 pixels). It runs NVIDIA's Tegra 2 chip that has two 1GHz cores under the die. This coupled with 1GB of RAM should help the Interface fly. Not only that, it also helps the XOOM in accomplishing number-crunching tasks like playing 1080p HD videos directly.
The browser will support Adobe Flash 10.1. The XOOM has a 5 megapixel camera at the back that can shoot 720p HD video. At the front, there's a 2 megapixel cam that should theoretically support HD video-calling, whenever that makes its way in the future. There's 32GB internal memory and a microSD card slot that supports 32GB worth cards. Connectivity is served by 3G, Wi-fi and Bluetooth. The XOOM is also said to be 'upgradeable' with the mind-blazingly fast LTE 4G support. Battery life is also rated like the iPad's - 10 hours of video playback.
So, as you can see, Motorola has pretty much pulled off everything that one could possibly ask for in a tablet with the XOOM. Now only if they can pull this off at a competitive price tag and we've got ourselves a winner. Now the only question remains is of the apps -- but we don't have any doubts over tablet-optimized apps coming soon to Android 3.0 that will take advantage of the bigger screen. We're talking of Android after all, an OS that went from zero to 2,00,000 apps (and counting) apps in a little over two years.
