It was 10 months ago, during the Super Bowl, that Motorola announced the original Xoom to the world. In a 60-second ad that spared no expense, Google and Motorola united to show us their bold new vision for tablets; Honeycomb was going to revolutionize Android and our lives with it, while the Xoom was to be the flagship cresting that wave of change. You know your history, so you're no doubt aware that those grand plans didn't come to fruition.
Hardware
Motorola's biggest alterations between the two Xoom generations can be found in the industrial design. The new slate is significantly thinner ¡ª a whole 33 percent, exactly the amount by which the iPad slimmed down between iterations ¡ª and equals or betters most of the tablet competition with its aggressively slim and light construction. In fact, the Xoom 2's 8.8mm (0.35 inches) thickness and 600g (1.32 pounds) weight are both direct matches for the measurements of the iPad 2 Wi-Fi model, a congruence in specs which I doubt was accidental. Unlike the Apple tablet, however, the Xoom 2 has a 16:10 display ratio, meaning it is longer and narrower, and the way it feels in use is markedly different.
Android 2.3 A6
The squarer iPad (or the HP TouchPad, which has the same 9.7-inch screen size, 1024 x 768 resolution, and 4:3 display ratio) is, in my opinion, a more natural form factor for tablets in the 10-inch size range than the Xoom 2's 1280 x 800 setup. Although their critical dimensions are the same, I find the iPad 2 much easier to handle and type on than the elongated Xoom 2. The latter presents a sort of one-size-fits-none proposition, where its keyboard is too wide in landscape mode to thumb-type comfortably and too tall in portrait mode to make for agreeable text input that way. Additionally, in spite of shedding some of the Xoom's weight, this is still a tablet that's better held in two hands than one. The Xoom 2's ergonomics remind me most of the Eee Pad Transformer, which too had some pronounced extra bezel around the display, though in the Transformer's case the reason was that it had a keyboard dock to hook up to. The Xoom 2 doesn't really have a good excuse for expanding the bezel relative to the original Xoom, though Motorola offsets that a little by chopping off the corners of its new tablet. It doesn't improve handling of the tablet, as I actually prefer the more mundane curves of the Xoom, but the new look is distinctive and attractive.
Display
Think of the glossiest material you've seen in your life ¡ª it was the original Xoom's display, right? I can't be sure that the Xoom had the most reflective screen ever, but Motorola did itself no favors by combining a very glossy front with a dim and unimpressive LCD. Fortunately, the company has learned from its folly and has returned with an IPS LCD in the Xoom 2 that is light years ahead of its predecessor. Colors are richer and more accurate, viewing angles are drastically improved, and although glare remains a problem, it's a much smaller one now. The only issue I encountered was that, at a certain angle, the backlight would overwhelm the image in front of it, washing out your view. I wouldn't worry too much about that, however, since the particular angle you need is close to 70 degrees off center, meaning that most of the time you'll be enjoying a tablet with a legitimately up-to-date display.
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Cameras
Despite keeping the same 5-megapixel resolution as on the Xoom, the Xoom 2's camera is a much-improved unit. In natural light, it can produce stunningly clear photos and Motorola's noise reduction is subtle enough not to blur any of the detail out. Color accuracy is sometimes lacking, but that's the only downer in what is the best tablet camera I've tested yet. Low-light situations do cause an increase in graininess and a loss of sharpness, but the Xoom 2 still performs well for its class.
Performance and battery life
The perpetual fly in the Honeycomb ointment has always been a lack of responsiveness and the Xoom 2 sadly keeps that trend up. The Android UI is a little quicker than on the original Xoom, but I encountered massive slowdown and consistently stuttery animations in a number of core apps. Gmail was the worst offender, but the web browser and official Twitter client were culprits too. This, it has to be stressed, is purely down to software optimizations, or the lack thereof. The 1.2GHz dual-core inside the Xoom 2 is a potent system-on-chip and it makes me sad to see it embarrassed by an unacceptably laggy user experience. Android 4 should go a long way to releasing the full potential of the hardware, but until then, Android 3.2 is a major bottleneck on performance.
T11 WCDMA+GSM
Wrap-up
One of the odder moments in that Super Bowl Xoom advert was the scene where the iconoclast with the Xoom tablet opted to walk up the stairs while all the conformists rode the escalator alongside him. Well, that's the experience of using a Honeycomb tablet in a nutshell. You're choosing effort over ease, grind over grace.
Motorola doesn't help matters by shipping software with even worse performance than we're used to from Honeycomb, and its few nice additions are buried under a mountain of lag. The Xoom 2 is built very well, fitting within a set of dimensions that would have been market-altering at this time last year and remain right on par with the leaders today. Its new IPS display is a triumph and the improved 5-megapixel camera brings tablet photography a great deal closer in quality to its smartphone brethren. The trouble is that all those good things are for naught if the software isn't good enough and, regrettably, that's exactly where the Xoom 2 finds itself. Android 4.0 may rejuvenate this tablet in a spectacular fashion, but until it does, the Xoom 2 is not an advisable purchase. If you must have a 10-inch Android tablet today, the Eee Pad Transformer Prime would be our top choice, followed closely by the Galaxy Tab 10.1.