Review: Motorola Xoom 2

The Motorola Xoom 2 is a great tablet for enterprise users, featuring a good supply of preloaded work-facing apps. The tablet is also great for home use, letting users stream digital movies and music from their other devices.

With the Xoom 2, Motorola has revamped the original Xoom tablet, beefing up the 1GHz processor somewhat with a 1.2GHz processor, while the tablet itself is both thinner and lighter. However, these also come with some downgrades - the Xoom 2 is only available in 16GB and 32GB versions with no expandable storage.

At R6 000, the Motorola Xoom 2 is a mid-level tablet, but Motorola will have to work hard to get this device into the hands of consumers in a world where the word 'tablet' has become synonymous with the iPad.

The Xoom 2 looks both elegant and rugged. The device has a rather strange shape with tapered corners - possibly to escape patent suits from Apple, which has been accused of trying to claim the rights to the rounded rectangle with a large screen.

The device looks refreshingly different from most tablets on the market. The tapered corners, which give the tablet an almost octagonal shape, are unique to the Xoom 2.

The screen sits in a slim, rubberised plastic chassis, which gives users a firm grip on the tablet. An anodised aluminium backing also keeps the tablet nice and cool.

At less than a centimetre thick, the device is pretty slim and weighs in at a mere 603g.

The Xoom 2 runs on Android 3.2 (Honeycomb) and has an undeniably neat interface. The home screen is set up with the essential apps, including browser, e-mail and calendar, as well as shortcuts to the Motolounge and the Play Store.

A shortcut to the device's apps is located at the top-right-hand corner alongside a shortcut to the various home screens and widgets, which include weather, bookmarks, calendar and contacts. At the bottom-left-hand corner, there are tabs for return, home and favourites, which brings up the most-used apps.

Users can also customise the various home screens with their favourite apps.

As already mentioned, the Motorola Xoom 2 runs on a dual-core 1.2GHz processor and 1GB of RAM, a slight upgrade from the original, which ran on a 1GHz processor. The Xoom 2 is WiFi- and Bluetooth-enabled.

I found browsing was fast, while the tablet had ample processing power to run the apps preinstalled on the device with no lag.

The tablet comes in 16GB and 32GB capacities, which are not expandable as there is no extra SD card slot. This may be a disappointment to some, and possibly a bad move on the part of Motorola, given that competitor tablets come in 62GB versions, or offer expandable storage. However, the fact that users can stream content from other devices to the Xoom 2 means the limited storage won't be a deal-breaker all round.

The 7 000 mAh battery lasted a good couple days on normal usage.

The Xoom 2 comes with a 5MP rear-facing camera and a 1.3MP front-facing camera. The front-facing camera is a downgrade from the 2MP camera on the original Xoom tablet, but is still adequate for video calling.

The tablet also comes with a music player, although its speakers, while not bad for a tablet, are not suited to playing music. Of course, there is an audio output for users who would like to beef up the sound.

The 10.1-inch display sports a 1 280x800-pixel resolution, offering bright, detailed images and making the device well suited to video consumption.

The screen has a built-in accelerometer, giving users access to a generously sized keyboard, which I found adequate for typing, although, for me, first prize is always a tangible keyboard. The screen is also covered with Gorilla glass.

As already mentioned, the Xoom 2 comes with great features for enterprise users. For example, the Citrix Receiver app lets users connect to their business applications and gives them access to Citrix Cloud.

Motorola's own Motocast app lets users stream content from their other devices to the Xoom 2 tablet. This can be done even when the user is not in the same place as the device. For example, users can stream music stored on their home PCs while at a friend's house. The service is reliant on an Internet connection because it is cloud-based. However, provided the user has a decent connection, it does cut out the need for more storage.

The Xoom 2 also comes preinstalled with other popular cloud-based apps, including Evernote, which lets users work on documents that can then be accessed from any of the user's devices, provided they also have Evernote installed.

Other work-facing apps featured on the Motorola include GoToMeeting, which lets users set up Web conference calls, and Documents To Go, which gives users access to Microsoft office applications, including Word and Excel.

The Xoom 2 is an elegant tablet that offers great functionality, with the likes of the Motocast solution, as well as access to the well-stocked Google Play store.

It comes at a recommended retail price of R6 000 and I would argue that the Xoom 2 is well worth its price.