Hasta La Gadget!

This week’s Gadget Lab podcast zooms in on the Motorola Xoom tablet, the upcoming iPad 2 and Intel’s new Thunderbolt connectivity standard.

The Motorola Xoom is a neat piece of hardware. It’s got a 10.1-inch screen (slightly bigger than the 9.7-inch iPad), front- and rear-facing cameras, 32 GB of storage and a 3G wireless connection. Oddly, the audio speakers are on the back, which makes the sound rather poor.

That’s a solid feature set, but the cheapest Xoom costs $800 — which is a pretty disappointing starting price compared to the iPad’s $500 sweet spot that nobody can seem to match. To be fair, the most-comparable iPad is the 32-GB model with 3G, which costs $720. But I argue the starting price will be the most important factor for new adopters who are still figuring out why they need a tablet in the first place, and $800 is way too high.

Nonetheless, the Xoom’s feature set puts Motorola’s tablet ahead of the iPad, so we’re interested to see what Apple has in store for us at next Wednesday’s iPad 2 event. We’re expecting an iPad with two cameras, more memory and a faster processor.

Speaking of Apple, the company introduced a major upgrade for its MacBook Pro family this week, adding the newest Intel processors and a brand-new connectivity port dubbed Thunderbolt. What’s Thunderbolt? Dylan explains it’s a versatile connectivity port that will eventually enable you to plug in just about any type of peripheral, potentially eliminating the need for desktop towers in the future. When was the last time you heard of a connectivity port this cool?

We close the podcast with a quick look at the iPhone game Tiny Wings (sorry, I called it Little Wings thanks to an on-camera brain fart), which soared to the No. 1 spot in the App Store’s bestsellers this week. It’s a cute game that perfectly executes the Angry Birds formula, so no wonder it’s a hit.

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Like the show? You can also get the Gadget Lab video podcast via iTunes, or if you don’t want to be distracted by our unholy on-camera talent, check out the Gadget Lab audio podcast. Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Lab video or audio podcast feeds

Or listen to the audio here:

Gadget Lab audio podcast #105

http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gadgetlabaudio/GadgetLabAudio0105.mp3

To Xoom or not to Xoom, that is the question — and Xoom Corporation says Motorola needs to ditch the name of its new Honeycomb-laden slate. That’s right, Xoom has filed a trademark infringement lawsuit asking for monetary damages, a temporary restraining order, and / or a preliminary injunction to spoil Moto’s release party for its new tablet. In case you’re curious, Xoom (the company) does seem to predate the slate by a good bit: it’s been operating its online payments business under that name and has owned the www.xoom.com domain since 2003. Xoom got a registered service mark for its money transfer and e-payment services in 2004.

But what about that Xoom trademark Motorola filed last year for mobile computers and related accessories? Traditionally, courts give priority to the first user to register a mark, so Xoom Corp. certainly has a case here, but we’re not so sure they’ll be able to prove that consumers are likely to be confused. To find out, the court will look at multiple factors to determine the likelihood of confusion: the strength of Xoom’s mark, the similarities between the two marks, the proximity of Xoom’s services and software to Moto’s tablet in the consumer marketplace, evidence of actual customer confusion, and the similarity of the marketing channels used by Moto and Xoom. Honestly, we can’t see Moto marketing the Xoom tablet to anyone looking for online payment services (aside from the occasional Android Market purchase) so Xoom Corp. has a tough road to hoe, but stranger things have happened — we’ll see how it goes.

Motorola dragged into court for Xoom trademark infringement originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Feb 2011 16:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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From the outside, tablets are almost all the same, especially when seen from the front. But like a pretty actor in a reality TV show, once you get under their skin you find out what really makes them tick. So it is with the Motorola Xoom, which has been opened up and photographed by — you guessed it — iFixit.

First off, it’s surprisingly easy to get in, requiring nothing but a Torx screwdriver to get the bulk of the cover off. This makes sense, as Motorola is going to be taking a lot of these apart to swap in 4G chipsets in the summer.

In fact, a lot of the design seems influenced by this crazy plan. To perform the swap, all a technician needs to do is remove those Torx screws, slide the rear cover open, remove a dummy chip-board and swap in the new one, reconnecting the antennas. It sounds a lot like swapping out Wi-Fi cards in a netbook, only with less screws. Here’s what iFixit has to say:

A seasoned technician can perform this swap in less than 10 minutes. Heck, a donkey could probably pull it off in less than two hours. We have no idea why a customer couldn’t just go to a Verizon store and have on-site representatives enable 4G on the spot, just like they’re able to transfer mobile contacts and perform other activation procedures.

Once inside, the first thing that you see is the huge battery, which is just as it should be: A tablet that doesn’t last all day is a tablet that isn’t worth buying. Then it’s onto the cameras (connected by separate cables for easy replacement), the speakers and then the main circuit board. As you already know, this contains the Nvidia Tegra T2 dual-core ARM A9 CPU and GeForce GPU. There’s not a lot of magic inside of any of these tablets — the trick is just to keep enough space spare to fit in a big battery.

IFixit rates the Xoom pretty high for fixability, and everything can be gotten out with “a spudger and a couple of Torx screwdrivers.” You’ll need some patience to tear everything down to the bare metal, though, because “there’s just a lot of labor involved with removing that many screws.”

Motorola Xoom Teardown [iFixit. Thanks, Miroslav!]

See Also:

• Farcical Xoom 4G Upgrade Plan Requires Mail-In, Six-Day Operation …
• Motorola Xoom Launches Without Flash
• XOOM
• Motorola Xoom $600 With Verizon Contract, $800 Without

Verizon’s Motorola Xoom 4G upgrade guidelines. Image: Droid Life

The Xoom tablet has a respectably fast Verizon 3G connection, but Motorola promises a free upgrade to Verizon’s faster 4G network within a few months.

To do that, however, you’ll need to ship your Xoom back to the manufacturer for more than a week.

It’s not often I laugh out loud when researching a post, but when reading up on the Motorola Xoom 3G to 4G upgrade procedure, I sounded like barking dog. If anyone has ever designed a more convoluted, ridiculous way to rush an unfinished product to market, I have yet to see it. But more on that in a moment.

Of course, you can buy Motorola’s Android 3.0–powered, 3G-enabled Xoom today. The promised upgrade to 4G is now slated for May (officially “90 days after launch”), and the upgrade involves shipping the tablet back to Motorola (also free) and waiting up to six business days (translation: more than a week). This despite the fact that the Xoom is clearly designed for easy upgrades, and the upgrade procedure probably takes no more than 10 minutes.

For customers who are happy to be without their tablets for a while, this is clearly good news: You get a free bump to use faster 4G networks. It’s good for Verizon, too, as you might sign up for a 4G plan (although you don’t have to). But for Motorola it’s plain dumb.

I don’t know how much it costs to pay for two-way shipping, opening up a tablet and replacing a part, but I can bet it isn’t cheap. After all, there’s a reason that replacing gadgets is often cheaper than repairing them. Add to this the fact that Motorola will have cut profit margins to the bone to compete with the iPad, and I can see this stunt losing the company a lot of money.

So why do it? Why not wait until it is ready and launch it in the summer? Two words: iPad 2. The iPad 2 will be here in April, and maybe even as early as next week, at which time many of the Xoom’s “advantages” will disappear. If our guesses are right, the Xoom’s camera and fast processor will no longer be unique, and the only extra will be 4G, aka “the ability to connect to a fast but sparsely deployed data network.” It seems rather obvious that Motorola was absolutely desperate to get its tablet out the door before Apple makes it irrelevant.

So, want to hear about what had me chuckling? Take a look at the “Getting Ready Guide” for the upgrade. Sandwiched in the middle is rather huge section on backing up your data before sending it off to Motorola. It boils down to this: Connect your Xoom via USB, dig down through its file system and then copy (via drag and drop) the files and folders onto your computer.

Then, when your machine is finally returned after surgery, you put it all back again. Just the kind of thing Auntie May will find it dead-easy to do.

And that’s before we even get to encrypting the contents to keep it safe in transit (“If you interrupt the encryption process, you will lose some or all of your data”).

Remind me why nobody is buying Android tablets, again?

Motorola Xoom Upgrade program [Verizon via Droid Life]

See Also:

• Motorola Xoom $600 With Verizon Contract, $800 Without
• Motorola Thinks You'll Pay $800 for the Xoom Tablet
• Motorola Xoom Launches Without Flash

Want to get your hands on the HP Pre 3, Veer, and the TouchPad? Sadly you can’t at this point, but you can see them doing their respective things in the video below. Our editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky made another visit to Jimmy Fallon last night with a all of HP’s upcoming toys, as well as the Motorola Atrix and the Xoom tablet too. It’s all embedded below, so make with the clicking.

Continue reading Josh stops by Jimmy Fallon with the Xoom, Pre 3, Veer, and TouchPad (video)

Josh stops by Jimmy Fallon with the Xoom, Pre 3, Veer, and TouchPad (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Feb 2011 08:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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