Guest Post by Alex. Alex writes about android tablets for the last 2 years and had hands on experience with every tablet available in the market.

During the past few days, the tablet community had been crazy about the release of Motorola’s Xoom (Android 3.0 tablet) and Apple’s iPad2. Both seem to have emerged among the highly-anticipated tablets to hit the market and a lot of people are comparing the two tablets to determine which is best. Apple is the market leader with IPad and with the release of IPad2 they want to continue being on the first place while Google with the release of Android 3.0 they are hoping to challenge Apple as they did with smartphones a couple of years ago.

APPEARANCE

It’s easier to catch attention when you look so stunning. This is not only true for people but also with gadgets.  That’s how the iPad 2 was created. It features a flatter and oblique back case in a beautiful white color and a round front border with just 8.8 mm thickness. If you think the iPhone 4 is thin, this one is thinner with a 9.7-inch screen. Indeed, the iPad 2 is an eye-catching gadget.

Motorola Xoom has also something to say with regards to looks. This gadget is equally skinny at 12.7 mm. Unlike the iPad 2, the Xoom has no physical navigation buttons making the screen lightly bigger at 10.1 inches.

Both indeed feature a stunning appearance but it seems that the iPad 2 got what it takes to win this round.

PROCESSOR

Both tablets feature a dual-core processor, the iPad 2 having 1 GHz Apple A5 and the Xoom having 1 GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2. We can’t yet determine which is faster since there are no solid benchmarks that show a clear win of one over the other. But if we add the Random Access Memory (RAM) info of each, it seems that the Xoom has an edge with its 1GB RAM which is twice as much as the 512MB RAM of Apple’s iPad 2.

CAMERA

The Xoom sports a 2 megapixel front-facing camera and a 5 megapixel rear-facing camera with an Auto-focus and dual-Led flash features. On the other hand, Apple has not fully revealed the camera features of its new tablet except the fact that it can shoot a 720 / 30 p video though according to some rumours, the front-facing camera of the iPad 2 will only feature a VGA lens while its rear camera will only support a 1.3 MP lens. If these will be true, the Xoom obviously takes this round.

OPERATING SYSTEM

Android 3.0 or Honeycomb has caused a sensation these days. Thus, tablets powered by this operating system are highly anticipated just like the Motorola Xoom. It’s a wonder though because the iPad 2 did not go with the trend. Instead, it runs with Apple’s very own mobile operating system, the iOS 4.3

NETWORK

In order to increase bandwidth, expedite growth, and support various applications, the International Telecommunications Union or ITU came up with the 3rd generation or more commonly known as 3G of the mobile telephony standards. This led to the improvement of many gadgets to support 3G network including both the Xoom and the iPad 2. However, Xoom seems to have added a 4G network which makes it win the race.

Either way, these two gadgets, aside from having been manufactured by two powerful companies, have what it takes to impress the market. Each having their great assets, I’m sure they will have their own market share. Now we know why these two are highly anticipated tablets.

Motorola Xoom VS IPad2

Motorola XOOM iPad 2
Dimensions 249.1 x 167.8 x 12.9 241.2 x 185.7 x 8.8
Weight 730 g 615 g
Screen size 10.1 inch 9.7-inch
Screen Resolution 1280 × 800 1024 x 768
CPU / Processor Dual-core 1GHz Nvidia Tegra2 1GHz Apple A5
Operating System Android 3.0 iOS 4.3
Internal Memory 32 GB expandable to 64GB 16 GB /32 GB / 64GB
RAM 1 GB 512MB

What is everyone else take on these two tablets? We would love to hear some opinion if you are using any of these two.