The Xoom currently has the best specs on the market, good enough to ensure a healthy dose of future-proofing. It has a dual core 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processor with hardware graphics acceleration, a gig of RAM (that’s a lot for an Android tablet), 3G with free upgrade to 4G LTE, dual band WiFi 802.11n, Bluetooth, a GPS and both front and rear cameras. Its 10.1” multi-touch capacitive display is extremely responsive and boasts an iPad-beating 1280 x 800 resolution that’s more often found on laptops. It’s the first tablet to ship with Android OS 3.0 Honeycomb, an OS that’s designed for tablets rather than smartphones. The Xoom sells for $599 with a 2 year Verizon Wireless contract (starting at $20/month) and $799 without a contract. Motorola plans to release a WiFi-only version that will sell for $599.

Android OS 3.0 is extremely fast, at least on this dual core beast of a tablet. Every interaction is quick and we found it a bit faster than the first gen iPad. Even with several heavyweight applications running in the background (a 3D game, Office suite, web browser, Gmail, Flixster and lesser apps), the Xoom remained extremely responsive. In terms of stability, we only experienced application force-closes when running apps that didn’t scale to the display size or get along with Honeycomb, and these didn’t crash the OS itself. The Android Market runs just fine with an update that’s automatically pushed once you’ve booted up the tablet for the first time. The crashes we and other reviewers saw before the Xoom’s release date were due to the older Market application. Speaking of the new Market application, it’s very cool. There are sections for tablet-specific apps (Google is still working on populating this since apps are coming out so quickly) and a filter for apps vs. Google books. It makes excellent use of the added screen real estate, is intuitive and graphically attractive.