| Price(3/5): |  |
| Design(3.5/5): |  |
| Features(3/5): | |
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Review
Motorola Xoom is one of the best Android tablets that your money can buy and when it came out it came together with some custom made accessories and this speaker dock was one of them. This docking station is designed to work with your Xoom tablet and give you eternal speakers as well as an ergonomic viewing angle and stability.
Design
If we look purely at the design of this docking station then we can see that Motorola engineers have not thought properly neither about the material, styling neither about any other parts of this device. If we examine it closer it has the dimensions of 6 inches x 2.9 inches x 8.6 inches (15.2 cm x 7.3 cm x 21.8 cm) and it weighs around 2 pounds (900 grams) so it is not a huge device and can be easily used on any nightstand or any other smaller desk. The whole device is made entirely from plastic so it is not that beautiful nor is it that appealing to Xoom owners.
The shapes and form of the overall dock is somewhat stylish but is does not give off any sort of professional or trustworthy feel. At the front there is a spot for your tablet but at the back there are the connection ports but in the middle you can find speaker covers that hide two mini speakers.
Functionality
If the design did not sound that appealing then the functionality will feel even worse as this dock is quite cheaply made and not so greatly designed speakers. When you want to dock your Xoom tablet you will have some trouble aligning it as there are two connection ports one for that micro USB that gives you the charging capabilities and the other is a micro HDMI port so you can attach your Xoom to a HD TV while it is docked in this speaker dock. There are some aligning points on the dock itself and also on the tablet but you will still need quite a lot of practice to get it to work and some users say that it took them 5 minutes to figure out how to properly dock their tablet.
Sound
Then there are those built in speakers that can give you additional sound boost and are louder than your tablets built in mini-speakers but not by much. These speakers sound really cheap and they can’t be turned to more than 70% of their loudness as then they start distorting sound quite significantly and it is not pretty. There is some Bass Boost but it is simply a hole in the dock that should allow more air to flow trough but that does not help at all.
This dock is powered by an external power adapter and there are no batteries so you will have to keep it close to an electricity outlet. At the back you get that AC power plug an a micro HDMI plug that will allow you to connect your HD TV or other devices and basically everything that you do on the Xoom is reproduced on that external display. This all sounds great but why did Motorola engineers had to make the same micro HDMI connector and why could they made a regular HDMI connection and a converter inside this dock? The space is certainly more than enough to do this and the original price could have made it possible. There are also no external USB connectors for multiple device charging and that is also a problem.
Conclusion
Motorola XOOM is a very great tablet but this accessory will not make it better because there are so many problems with it! The only explanation for buying this is the price that is reduced almost 10 times as it is designed only for the original Xoom and they obviously have made more than people bought so if you have the original Xoom tablet and you want a cheap accessory then this is for you.
