The Motorola Xoom went on sale yesterday. Then the IHS iSuppli team of teardown experts opened up a Motorola Xoom tablet running Google Android 3.0 on Verizon Wireless' CDMA network. The Motorola Xoom is faster and has more features and power than the current iPad is referred to as the first true iPad rival.
There currently are no components for 4G LTE installed in the Motorola Xoom, but there are antennas an SIM card slots ready for an upgrade, which is why owners will have to take in their tablets for an upgrade to 4G LTE. A new feature found in the circuity is a barometer to work with GPS indoor navigation.
The 10.1-inch touchscreen, 1.6-pound tablet closely approximates the Apple iPad's dimensions but outdoes its year-old forerunner by including both a 2-megapixel front-facing camera, and a 5-megapixel autofocus primary camera.
Unlike the iPad, the Motorola Xoom now comes in only one configuration, with 32GB of NAND storage. However, the Motorola Xoom makes up for this lack of variety with its powerful dual-core NVIDIA Corp. Tegra 2 apps processor, ample 1GB synchronous dynamic random access-memory (SDRAM), and loads of extra sensors.
The Motorola Xoom is marketed to consumers as a device that is upgradable to 4G free of charge. The IHS iSuppli teardown reveals why Motorola Xoom owners must surrender their product back to the factory for a physical upgrade to 4G networking. There were no 4G components found in the Motorola Xoom tablet aside from a dummy miniPCIe card--an obvious placeholder for the future LTE upgrade. However, Motorola did provide two MIMO antennas and a SIM card slot in preparation for the LTE upgrade.
While the Apple iPad incorporated a single-core ARM processor, the Motorola Xoom ups the ante with a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 solution. By using a dual-core design, the Motorola Xoom
and can run processes and software much faster. The XOOM also includes
nearly four times as much SDRAM for code storage that Apple's A4
microprocessor employed, further boosting performance. The Tegra 2
provides very competitive performance relative to traditional
microprocessors found in netbook PCs, platforms that compete with media
tablets.
The Motorola Xoom uses the Atmel mXT1386 touchscreen controller, a new 32-bit device capable of registering up to 16 discrete touch points. While the IHS iSuppli Teardown Analysis Team has identified single-chip Atmel touchscreen controllers in the past in Android smart phones, this solution contains a whopping four-chip solution from Atmel.
The Motorola Xoom seems to be pushing the bounds for integrating a large number of sensors in a tablet. Besides the more mundane CMOS image camera sensors, there are a host of other sensors. These include an electronic compass from AKM Semiconductor, a 3-axis accelerometer from Kionix, a 3-axis gyroscope from STMicroelectronics and a pressure monitor from Bosch Sensortec. Why did Motorola include a barometer in a tablet? According to IHS microelectromechanical sensor expert Jérémie Bouchaud, this pressure sensor works in conjunction with the global positioning system (GPS) for indoor navigation applications.
A more complete IHS iSuppli teardown analysis of this device, including a comprehensive bill of materials (BOM) and hardware cost assessment, will come early next week.
For more information on IHS iSuppli's Motorola XOOM teardown, read An Early Look Inside Motorola's First Google Android v3.0 Tablet .
The Motorola Xoom won many awards at CES.
- Verizon's online exclusive deals.
It’s nice to see other devices being recognized aside from Apple products. Sure, you can call Xoom a copy cat. But this copy cat happens to be better than the original. With the help of Honeycomb OS, this is the future of tablet PCs.