Motorola Xoom tablet becomes official

The long rumored Motorola tablet got very official yesterday at CES. The tablet is indeed called the Xoom (pronounced "zoom"), and will be available on Verizon sometime this spring for an unannounced price. The tablet itself features some pretty impressive specs including a dual core Tegra 2 processor, 10" screen, full HD video playback, 32GB of internal storage, 5MP rear camera and a 2MP front camera. It will be locked to Verizion with no word of a WiFi only version, and it will be upgradeable to Verizon's 4G LTE network later this summer.

Be sure to check out lots more pictures of the Xoom over at Androinica.

The bigger news about the Xoom, however, is that it runs Android 3.0, Honeycomb. The announcement was the first time we got a glimpse at Honeycomb, and it truly is a completely new Android experience, optimized for tablets. The only concrete details are what's visible in the video Google released, which is below. It looks like there are new versions of most of the Google apps, as well as virtual home, back and menu buttons in the bottom left.



Details like release date, whether it will work on phones, and when the open source code will be released are unknown, but Google promises that more details about 3.0 will be coming soon. So be sure to stay tuned for more details. Until then, expect lots and lots of other tablet announcements now that 3.0 is out in the open. [via Androinica and Google]

Very exciting stuff here, and there's kind of too much going on to even wrap your head around in such a short post. The Xoom is a seriously impressive looking tablet and I fully admit to wanting one. It's forever locked to Verizon, which is unbelievably disappointing. Fortunately, this isn't the only tablet that we'll see...not by a long shot. There will be dozens more, all running Honeycomb (which looks weird and awesome all at the same time), and some of them will be WiFi only, or locked to other, more desirable carriers. I think it's safe to say that the Android tablet explosion is here.

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This honestly doesn't really look all that exciting, especially compared to the Asus ones announced the other day. The teaser made it out to be something revolutionary, but I don't see anything really super special. The fact that it's running Honeycomb is big, but the Asus ones already beat them the punch on that one.

Speaking of Honeycomb...what the heck is going on there? I don't really know what to think based on that video, but I'm sure it'll be awesome. And it really does make a lot of sense to have a separate version for phones and tablets--as the Xoom teaser pointed out. I'm excited to see more details about what it will include.