So far the thing that I have liked the best at the CES show is the Motorola Xoom.    It is a tablet device.  I gave my wife Karen an iPad for Christmas, and I have definitely been envious of it.  I think that the timing for these types of devices is right now. 

It was a very pleasant surprise to see the Motorola Xoom, which is also in tablet form. It has some features that I think that I like better.  The product launched at the CES in Las Vegas.  Part of what I liked was that, like the Droid before it, the Xoom is a product of a collaborative effort from Motorola, Google, and Verizon. Each company leverages their unique value proposition to bring effectively a “best of breed” product to market. 

Motorola has made a very nice piece of gear.  It is designed to be upgradeable, it has good performance, and seems very well built.  Verizon is providing the always on connection, first in 3G, with the ability to upgrade to 4G as it becomes more available.   Google is contributing the next major version (version 3.0) of the Android OS, which has been nicknamed “Honeycomb”.  Honeycomb is a major revision of the Android OS designed to support tablets.  I really like that these three have figured out that users want to see the plan and understand how these things will evolve.

I don’t think that I can capture much reality about the user interface in words and pictures, but the Honeycomb interface provides a dynamic and intuitive menu and control interface that is easy to call up, and can automatically disappear and free up screen real estate.  My take was that it felt very much like how things should work. 

The interface uses a card stack kind of approach for content, which also seems pretty straightforward.  All told, it looks like a powerful OS that doesn’t intrude on what you want to accomplish. 

I liked this device a lot.  It is expected to be released in February.   I don’t personally see the need for 4G right now, but really like that I can upgrade in a while once the rest of the ecosystem is ready.

Motorola Xoom specs

* 10.1-inch 1280×800 resolution display
* Android Honeycomb 3.0 OS
* Nvidia Tegra 2 dual core processor
* Dual Cameras
* 5 MP rear-facing camera with dual LED flash
* 2 MP front-facing camera
* 1GB RAM
* 32 GB inbuilt memory
* Micro SD support
* Wi-Fi 2.4GHz & 5GHz 802.11b/g/n
* Bluetooth 2.1
* 3.5mm audio jack
* micro USB 2.0 HS
* 730 g weight
* 249.1mm (h) x 167.8mm (w) x 12.9mm (d) – dimension
* AAC, AAC+, AMR NB, AMR WB, MP3, XMF support
* 10 hour video playback – battery