MOTOROLA DROID XYBOARD 10.1

Motorola has introduced an upgrade to its popular Xoom tablet with the Droid XYBoard (also known as Xoom 2 outside of USA), released at the end of 2011. Unfortunately, while some improvements have been made in design and hardware, the Motorola Droid XYBoard 10.1 has not evolved significantly in other areas and in fact some specs represent something of a step backward.

One of the better features in the original Xoom was the nice 10.1" screen, truly a top-line model for video viewing. This has even been improved for the Droid XYBoard 10.1, with reinforced Corning glass and a liquid-resistant overcoating. The size has been trimmed, with this tablet just 0.35" (0.88 cm) thick and almost exactly 600 grams (1.3 pounds); battery power is still a strength, as Motorola promises 10 hours of full use.

In the hardware is where the Motorola Droid XYBoard 10.1 suffers a bit. While the 1.2 GHz dual-core processor is powerful enough, the company made the conscious decision to outfit the Droid XYBoard 10.1 with Android 3.2. As Android 4.0 source code has recently been released, the Droid XYBoard may be the last 10” tablet to run on this OS: This potentially makes the Droid XYBoard 10.1 a dinosaur within weeks of release.

The Motorola Droid XYBoard includes 5 MP and 1.3 MP cameras which work well enough, but internal memory is limited to a scanty 16 GB – and inexplicably, Motorola has removed the micro SD card port that allowed expansion in the original Xoom.