Motorola Xoom vs HTC Flyer

Motorola announced its entry into the tablet world with the launch of Motorola Xoom. And the tablet war seems to be gaining momentum as there are more new high-end players joining the arena each passing day. The recent one being HTC's tablet device, the HTC Flyer, which was launched during MWC 2011.

We check out the vital statistics of both these new devices. We show you how the HTC Flyer's specs and feature list stack up against one of its direct competitors - the Motorola Xoom.

Screen
The HTC Flyer has a 7-inch TFT touchscreen with 1024x600 resolution, which stacks up as fairly meagre against the Xoom’s 10.10-inch capacitive touchscreen at 1280x800. We know size isn’t everything but we’re consistently unimpressed with tablets which are 7-inches or less as it kind of defies the point of a tablet in our view and ends up feeling more like a chunky phone.

Scale issues aside both screens seem fairly impressive, HTC consistently makes very nice bright screens with vivid colours.

Nonetheless, the Xoom’s screen just pips the Flyer though bumping the resolution above much of the competition.

Winner: Motorola Xoom

Form
Not only is the Motorola Xoom larger it’s also thinner as well at 12.9mm compared to the Flyer’s 13.2mm. The HTC, being the smaller device, beats the Motorola in the weight department though at 415g including the battery, while the Xoom weighs in at 730g.

It’s a reasonable bet that the HTC will be very well made but from the images we’ve seen it isn’t the better looking of the two.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with the Flyer’s appearance but it’s simply that the Xoom is an extremely good-looking piece of kit in our opinion and infinitely more desirable than the Flyer.

Winner: Motorola Xoom

Operating System
Both tablets will run Android, the Xoom will ship with Honeycomb 3.0 while the Flyer will have Gingerbread at first but will soon be upgraded to Honeycomb too.

One point worth mentioning is the Flyer will have the HTC Sense overlay on the Android OS, which has been known to cause slowdown, while the Xoom will simply run native Google Android and should avoid such problems.

For this reason, we have to go with Motorola – it;s made the smart choice by leaving Android 3.0 as it's meant to be, which will yield optimal performance.

Winner: Motorola Xoom

Storage
HTC’s new baby will have 32GB of internal storage and 1GB of RAM plus micro SD-support, which will provide up 32GB of extra space.

Motorola’s offering, meanwhile, also sports 1GB of RAM (1.24GB if I’m being pedantic, which I am) and 32GB of internal storage. It also takes micro SD and micro SDHC up to an additional 32GB.

There’s not much between the two here so we’re calling this round a draw.

Winner: Draw

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