Motorola Droid Xyboard 8.2 review: Motorola Droid Xyboard 8.2

6.3

Motorola Droid Xyboard 8.2

The Good

The <b>Motorola Droid Xyboard 8.2</b> is thin and light, with one of the brightest screens we've seen on a tablet. It also includes Micro-HDMI, a 5-megapixel camera that performs well, powerful speakers, and fast 4G LTE speeds, and it can act as a universal remote.

The Bad

The tablet doesn't offer a compelling-enough experience to warrant signing a two-year contract or buying it outright for its $600 off-contract price. Also, navigation was plagued by frequent hangs, the placement of the power button and volume rocker is annoying, and the aluminum plate on the back looks shoddily implemented.

The Bottom Line

Although thin and light, with fast 4G LTE speeds, the Motorola Droid Xyboard 8.2 is impossible for us to recommend at its current price.

Photo gallery:
Motorola Droid Xyboard 8.2

The original Xoom arrived in a pre-iPad 2 world. Given that context, Motorola's original tablet was well-designed, with great hardware, and since it marked the debut of Honeycomb, it was arguably the first Android tablet with a capable operating system.

Less than a year later, given what Samsung has done with its Galaxy Tab line of tablets and what Asus was able to pull off with the Transformer Prime, a company would be crazy to release a tablet with specs and features identical to the Xoom. Not if it had any reasonable expectation of success, that is.

So, as we prepare to enter yet another year of constantly advancing technology, the release of the Droid Xyboard 8.2 demands the question: did Motorola push the design, performance, and features of its follow-up to the Xoom far enough to make it worth considering, or is this a stopgap on the road to something far more impressive?

Design
The 8.2-inch version of the Xyboard is, not surprisingly, both thinner and lighter than the 10.1-inch Xoom. It's also lighter than the 9.7-inch iPad 2, but Apple's tablet is still a hair skinnier.