Motorola XYBOARD 10.1 Pro Reviews

If you want a 10.1-inch tablet, there aren't really many compelling reasons to buy this over the Transformer Prime, unless you really want the freedom of having 4G radios or an IR blaster. For about the same price the Transformer is just faster, more future-proofed, and has better battery life. The 8.2 makes a decent case for itself, however. It's got the 4G radio and IR blaster, but it's super portable, and it packs the same resolution into a smaller display which gives it a higher pixel density. If you're intrigued by these puppies, that's the one to get. All that said, you should hold off until we see A) what is announced at CES, B) when that Ice Cream Sandwich update is coming, and C) how said update affects performance. Even at the subsidized price you get with a new Verizon contract, these aren't cheap, and the monthly data cost is something to factor in as well. Hold off for now.

When it comes right down to it, it’s a tough choice to choose a Verizon 10-inch tablet. When comparing he Motorola DROID XYBOARD 10.1 and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, both offer an array of high-end features and have the exact same price ($629 for the 32GB models with 2-year contract). We prefer the DROID XYBOARD 10.1 as it has a better overall feel to it, due to the premium materials used, which gives it extra durability for daily use. However, it comes a few months later but doesn't bring any significant improvements. In addition, with technology continuing to improve, it seems like there’s always a new tablet coming out, making it only a matter of time until the next big thing.

When the Motorola Xoom was launched with Honeycomb, I was slightly disappointed by its hardware design and the below average quality of the display. Consequently, I was happily surprised when I saw the Motorola Droid Xyboard 10.1 for the first time, the chassis design is sleek and elegant and the IPS display offers high contrast and great color accuracy. The Droid Xyboard 10.1, known as Xoom 2 outside of the US, has the advantage to offer Verizon 4G LTE connectivity, a convenient feature for road warriors who are tired to look for WiFi hotspots while on-the-go. With a 2-year contract, you will be able to purchase the 16 GB version for $529.99 and the 32 GB version for $629.99.

Frankly, the Motorola DROID XYBOARD 10.1 is a respectable tablet within the Android sphere, even more when it packs additional goodies such as an IR blaster and stylus, but when it’s pitted against the newly available iPad, its cost is by far its kryptonite. Consider this, that the iPad rocks a starting price point of $630 for the base 16GB LTE model, which is less than the full $700 outright cost of the comparable 16GB LTE version of the XYBOARD 10.1. The more we think about it, they both have their standout features, but when first impressions make all the difference, the iPad has the distinctive advantage in capturing our attention from afar.

The Xyboard 10.1 is a good attempt from Motorola to provide the enterprise crowd with a reliable tablet option. In some ways, in succeeds: if you avoid video-intensive activities, battery life is solid, it has 4G connectivity, and many of its preloaded business apps are extremely useful. But on the other hand, the inclusion of the stylus proves to be more or less useless beyond serving as a navigation tool. It had massive potential, especially for the enterprise demographic, but any attempt to use it for input will be inconvenient at best; at its worst, it just won't work at all thanks to the Xyboard's lack of palm rejection. There aren't enough serious flaws for me to just write the Xyboard off completely. But there are enough flaws to balance out its strengths and make it a middle-of-the-road option for business users. More casual users looking for a device for content consumption, however, can probably look elsewhere. You can probably knock a few bucks off the price if you opt for a device without 4G, stylus support, and preloaded business apps (and encryption). There is a Wi-Fi only option of the Xyboard 10.1, but it's still $500 with 16 GB of memory. Casual users are better off going with another option rather than paying $500 for a feature set you mostly don't need.

The Motorola Xyboard 10.1 is outpaced by other Honeycomb Android tablets which cost less.

2011 has been a landmark year for Android tablets. Motorola deserves all due credit for sparking interest in premium tablets running Google's Android Honeycomb software with the Xoom tablet it launched in February. Now, at the end of the year, the Motorola Xyboard 10.1 tablet may be the last of its breed before the market shifts its focus to Android 4.0 and increasingly thinner premium tablets (as well as budget devices like Amazon.com's Kindle Fire). Personally, I don't understand how Motorola and Verizon produced the Droid Xyboard 10.1 without sticking their heads in the sand all year. How else could they have concluded that customers are willing to pay such a high price for a contract-constricted Honeycomb tablet? The timing doesn't help, either. Even if Verizon decides to take the subsidized price of the Xyboard down to $0, January's CES will undoubtedly provide a new wave of tablets to lust over, and Apple's expected March or April iPad 3 unveiling should give a chill to anyone about to step into a two-year contract. With so many capable, affordable tablets out there, this is a difficult tablet to recommend. Aside from its 4G LTE compatibility and the promise of an Android 4.0 update, there's little here that cannot be found elsewhere, for substantially less money.

People that read my reviews frequently will probably already know of my preference for smaller tablets over larger ones. I just find a 10.1-inch tablet unwieldy, even if it is relatively light. As such, I greatly prefer the cheaper 8.2-inch DROID XYBOARD over the 10.1-inch model. Both are very nice, or at least as much so as Android Honeycomb allows, and they offer blazing LTE data speeds. In the end, though, price and required monthly data contracts will be their undoing. In a world where Apple's iPad 2 is available for the same basic price at the XYBOARD 10.1, and Amazon is offering a solid 7-inch Android tablet for less than half the cost of the 8.2, they'll be fighting uphill battles. Even if they are pretty nice machines.

And that is ultimately why the Xyboards are not worth the cash — their pricing is just as out there as their names. The 8.2 and the 10.1 aren’t bad tablets; in fact, they are solid pieces of hardware (despite the button and expandable storage issues) with software that’s decent, but still held back by an ecosystem. But half a grand and $720 over the next two years seems like an outrageous combo for a piece of hardware that isn’t even the latest and greatest on the market today. Next week the first quad-core tablet hits — the Transformer Prime — and it has double the performance, a better display, and camera for just $499. It doesn’t have built-in LTE, but you can get a $50 LTE Novatel MiFi 4510L from Verizon (with a two-year contract) and it would cost the same amount as the 10.1. Yes, the Xyboards are some of the fastest LTE tablets around and they even have some neat features, but ultimately, Verizon needs to rethink its tablet pricing strategy, or at least throw a skateboarding robot in the box.