Features
Android 3.1 has come with a completely redesigned UI. The home screens now offer the usual info – battery level, wireless connectivity, cellular network info etc. now shows up on the bottom right edge of the display. Tapping on these opens up a more detailed status pop-up, and you can head to the settings menu from here. On the top right corner is where you open up the usual apps list from. The bottom left corner has the return, home and tasks options. We had slotted a Vodafone SIM-card in the Xoom, and any messages that were received on that number showed up as a pop-up on the home screen. This is pretty neat, because the device doesn’t allow voice calls. These SMS’ weren’t stored anywhere, the pop-ups didn’t disappear unless you clicked on OK. The new task manager stacks up thumbnails according to when you last opened the app.The Xoom that we received for review was the 32GB (Wi-Fi + 3G) version.
Android 3.1 has come with a completely redesigned UI. The home screens now offer the usual info – battery level, wireless connectivity, cellular network info etc. now shows up on the bottom right edge of the display. Tapping on these opens up a more detailed status pop-up, and you can head to the settings menu from here. On the top right corner is where you open up the usual apps list from. The bottom left corner has the return, home and tasks options. We had slotted a Vodafone SIM-card in the Xoom, and any messages that were received on that number showed up as a pop-up on the home screen. This is pretty neat, because the device doesn’t allow voice calls. These SMS’ weren’t stored anywhere, the pop-ups didn’t disappear unless you clicked on OK. The new task manager stacks up thumbnails according to when you last opened the app.The Xoom that we received for review was the 32GB (Wi-Fi + 3G) version.
Performance
In terms of the power game, the Xoom does pack a significant punch - dual core Tegra 2 SoC, consisting of two ARM Cortex A9 CPU cores running at 1 GHz and 1GB of RAM. In simple terms, apps run much smoother than we expected. Games run smoother than all other Android tablets we have tested till now, Angry Birds fans rejoice! Multitasking didn’t really slow down the tablet at all, and the new task manager introduced with Android 3.1 does make for a visually appealing package. Weirdly though, if you are transferring anything to the Xoom via the data cable, the OS completely freezes and refuses to respond till the file transfer is complete. We faced this problem when sending music and movies to the Xoom’s internal memory.
In terms of the power game, the Xoom does pack a significant punch - dual core Tegra 2 SoC, consisting of two ARM Cortex A9 CPU cores running at 1 GHz and 1GB of RAM. In simple terms, apps run much smoother than we expected. Games run smoother than all other Android tablets we have tested till now, Angry Birds fans rejoice! Multitasking didn’t really slow down the tablet at all, and the new task manager introduced with Android 3.1 does make for a visually appealing package. Weirdly though, if you are transferring anything to the Xoom via the data cable, the OS completely freezes and refuses to respond till the file transfer is complete. We faced this problem when sending music and movies to the Xoom’s internal memory.