xoom

Editor's note: The full review of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 can be found here.

If there's one thing I've realized in my short stint covering tablets, it's that apparently there can never be too many Honeycomb-based products in the wild. Today, at Google's I/O conference, the company gave away 5,000 Wi-Fi-only Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1s. CNET was fortunate enough to have a few good men in the field willing to wade through cell phone belt holders and short sleeve button shirts to get us one.

Design and features The first thing that struck us upon taking the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 out of its box was its slight profile. In fact, when lying next to the iPad 2 we honestly can't tell which tablet is thicker and unfortunately we don't have a micrometer handy to get down into the business of microns.… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--iRobot hopes someday soon a robot waiter will deliver your food--and it might well use an Android tablet to see, hear, speak, and think.

At the Google I/O show here today, iRobot CEO Colin Angle showed off a prototype called AVA that the company plans to begin selling this year to developers to try to ignite the market.

Today there are two general robot types that are sustainable businesses: high-end, expensive ones for defusing bombs in Afghanistan or monitoring radiation in Japan, and low-end ones for vacuuming. Angle wants an intermediate category and believes tablets will enable that market to develop.

"The third option is the interesting one, with technology advances enabling robots to do things more like Rosie from the Jetsons," Angle told thousands of developers assembled at Google's show. "That's where you all come in. The robot industry can't be trusted to solve this problem. We need the mobile computing industry to come in and save our bacon through things like this."

AVA grafts a tablet onto a mobile robot body that can navigate floors. An Android-powered Motorola Xoom tablet was not just the brains of the operation, but the senses and face as well.

"We in the robot industry realized this is a fantastic head for a robot," with a camera and microphone for visual input and a screen and speakers to let people interact with the robot. "What was missing was the body," Angle said.

Thus, AVA, with a tablet on top of a stalk and a wider base with wheels to move around. The robot can create its own map of an area as it navigates. … Read more

Future versions of Motorola's Atrix smartphone-laptop combo will be rolled out as Android "alternatives" to tablets and other newfangled devices, Motorola's chief executive said this week.

The phone maker's first crack at the Atrix smartphone-laptop convergence wasn't perfect. CNET Reviews said the lack of Google's Chrome operating system hurts (Atrix uses a FireFox-centric "Webtop" operating environment). And performance in the laptop configuration (i.e., the 'lap-dock") is sluggish.

But that doesn't mean it's toast, considering all of the praise the Atrix 4G and laptop dock received at CES … Read more

Motorola Mobility beat analyst estimates, saying it shipped over 250,000 tablets since the Xoom went on sale in February, as the company reported better-than-expected results today.

The Libertyville, Ill., company reported a first-quarter net loss of $81 million, or 27 cents a share, compared with a net loss of $212 million, or 72 cents a share, during the same period last year. Revenue grew 22 percent to $3.03 billion.

The company reported an adjusted net income loss of 8 cents a share. The analysts' consensus was for a loss of 11 cents a share on revenue of $2.… Read more

Yes, I'm a huge Mortal Kombat fan. This should be evident to anyone after watching the video above. However, I can't take credit for the whole tournament idea. That was the brainchild of my producer, Jamie Yee (she's actually a hidden Easter egg in the video, if you watch closely). Jamie's a huge sports nut (or at least, an San Francisco Giants nut) and apparently thinks only in terms of brackets and tournaments.

Anyway, last week was a fairly busy week for the CNET tablet reviews team. Donald Bell and I received three new tablets in the span of only a few days.

With all that glamorous reviewing we were doing, I didn't really have the bandwidth to conduct any official speed tests, until now.

As I alluded to before, we split the tests into two rounds. The first round, featuring the Acer Iconia Tab A500, T-Mobile G-Slate, and the Asus Eee Pad Transformer, would determine which tablet would take on the Xoom and iPad 2 in the final round.

So yeah, it's a two-round tournament. We thought about extending it, but decided that doing so would involve too much repetition in the video.

Check out the results below (or above if you prefer your results in talkies form).… Read more

Google lost some ground in its effort to catch Apple's lead in the effort to attract mobile developer interest, but other rivals aren't even close, survey data released today show.

So concludes the latest quarterly survey by Appcelerator, released today. The company, along with analyst firm IDC, polled 2,760 developers in mid-April who are using Appcelerator's Titanium cross-platform development software.

"Interest in Android has recently plateaued as concerns around fragmentation and disappointing results from early tablet sales have caused developers to pull back from their previous steadily increasing enthusiasm for Google's mobile operating system,&… Read more

New estimates for sales of Motorola's Xoom tablet--available since late February--are in, but even the most optimistic predictions are scarily small and pale next to the iPad 2's first-weekend sales numbers.

With Motorola Mobility due to report first quarter earnings on Thursday, analysts today released a new round of sales estimates for the first tablet from a first-tier supplier to sport Google's Android 3.0 operating system.

Let's break this news gently and start with the most rosy forecast. Sanford Bernstein analyst Pierre Ferragu expects Motorola to announce it shipped 200,000 Xooms, according to an … Read more

Amazon.com has updated its Kindle Android app with features designed to tap into the Honeycomb interface currently found on the Motorola Xoom and T-Mobile's LG G-Slate.

Available now at Amazon's Appstore for Android, Kindle for Android 3.0 is geared for all Android devices but takes special advantage of the larger displays and other attributes offered by Honeycomb-powered tablets.

The updated version offers a virtual bookshelf that stretches across the screen to let people visually browse and view titles at the Kindle store. The new interface also provides quicker access to customer reviews, recommendations, and other items … Read more

Research In Motion may have sold more BlackBerry PlayBook tablets than analysts expected, as many as 50,000 on the first day alone, according to RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky.

In a research note sent to investors yesterday, Abramsky said he and his team checked with 70 different retail stores, including Best Buy, Staples, and RadioShack outlets, to ask about PlayBook sales on the first day. The team found a range of responses from light sales to 11 percent of the stores sold out, but overall leading to an estimate of 50,000 sold on opening day this past … Read more