Gadgetory

well this is Joanna for the verge and these are the motorola droid xyboard that's right XY be 0 ard xyboard and it is probably the worst product name ever but the products themselves are actually not all that bad Motorola has done a significant amount to the tablet since the original zoom which hit about a year ago both of the tablets are much thinner their point 35 inches thick and the 8.2 weighs only point 85 pounds and the 10.1 ways 1.32 pounds but while the tablets definitely have differing screen sizes there's not much else that really separates them both of them have really nice rubber edges and motorola's also cut off some of the edges and they also have really nice IPS displays and while the 8.2 is smaller than the 10.1 it still has the same 1080 x 800 resolution Motorola's also increase the quality of the camera on the back it's a 5 megapixel camera that takes pretty decent stills and nice video and on the front side there's a 1.3 megapixel camera which is great for video chatting you also notice that along the top of the tablets there's an IR blaster Motorola includes the digit app so you can use your tablet as a remote control for your TV and it actually works pretty well however there are some things I do not like about the hardware and the first is the power button the power button on both of these tablets is located on the back but unfortunately it's very close to the volume rocker so you don't actually know which one you're hitting and because they're so recessed you're not even sure if you're hitting one at all on top of that there's no microSD card slot so you're stuck with the internal storage there's also a stylist that comes with the 10.1 and while it's pretty cool for doodling and taking notes when you put your hand on the screen it's pretty bad with palm rejection internally Motorola has also up the specs a little bit it now has a 1.2 gigahertz TI omap processor and one gigabyte of ram the performance isn't bad by any means but it can get a little bit sluggish in some places though the browser performance was pretty good that said I just came from testing the Tegra 3 powered transformer prime and that is much faster all around both sideboards run Android 3.2 honeycomb which isn't the best app experience on tablet but Motorola is promising an update to Ice Cream Sandwich sometime soon the standout spec of these tablets is obviously the LTE provided by Verizon and it is really fast I got great speeds around Manhattan and I was able to connect these tablets to my laptop and use it as a hotspot but the big problem is with those pricing plans both these tablets come subsidized though they're pretty expensive as is the 10.1 costs five hundred and thirty dollars and the 8.2 costs 430 and on top of that you've got to commit to a two-year plan which will cost about thirty dollars a month over the long haul that comes out to about eight hundred dollars for two years that's a lot of money to plop down on a tablet that isn't exactly the best by today's standards the transformer prime hits later this week and not only does it have a better display and camera it has a quad-core Tegra 3 processor for just four hundred and ninety-nine dollars if you must have an LTE tablet these are definitely options but I would really suggest getting a transformer prime in an LTE mifi which costs fifty dollars or you can always get an ipad 2 with 3g which doesn't require that two-year contract you