Performance

The Xoom is powered by an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, and , Anand Lai Shimpi found swiping between home screens to be "butter smooth." Same goes for scrolling through the browser and using interactive widgets. But he noticed that performance seems more dependent than previous Android versions on how many background apps are running.

One clear advantage for the Xoom over Apple's iPad: transfer speeds. "Anyone who has synced content to an Apple iPad knows how tortuously slowly content moves from PC to device," PCWorld's Perenson wrote. "On the Xoom, waiting wasn't a huge issue: I transferred 700MB of digital pictures to the Xoom in just 3 minutes."

Honeycomb

Android 3.0 makes its debut on the Xoom, and it's a vastly different -- some say better -- experience than Android for smartphones.