Motorola Xyboard Tablet Review

Screen

The screen of the Motorola Xyboard is a 8.5625 x 5.325 inch TFT LCD display that is IPS-enhanced, which we're not entirely clear on how that works, but that's what Motorola is claiming their screen is. Like most of the higher-end tablets on the market, the touchscreen used by the Xyboard is capacitive, as well as semi-water-resistant.

Indoor & Outdoor Use

Like most tablets with an LCD screen, the Motorola Xyboard is highly reflective, and even its decently high brightness isn't enough to overpower the sun, so with these factors combined, it doesn't do terribly well in the outdoors unless it has some help from shade, cloud cover, or generally bad weather.

NOTE: The images above are shot with a variety of lighting sources, which may cause some color shift.

Legibility

Because the Motorola Xyboard has a high DPI and an appropriately large resolution for its screen size, there should be no legibility issues for readers who like even the smallest of fonts, as the Motorola Xyboard displays a crisp, clear image.

Reflectance

Like most LCD-screened tablets, the Motorola Xyboard has a very highly-reflective screen and an extremely sharp reflection pattern, which does not bode well for use outdoors on even a moderately sunny day. We found that the Motorola Xyboard reflects about 17.7% total light back at the user.

Screen Size & DPI

With a resolution of 1280 × 800 and a screen size of 8.5625 × 5.325 inches (150 DPI), the rather large screen of the Motorola Xyboard has no issues with loss of detail whatsoever. Granted, it’s a smallish display in comparison to a television set, so it’s not exactly fair to expect it to support all standard NTSC resolutions or anything.

Blacks And Whites

There’s a cost to having a peak brightness, and that’s usually having a very high black level if your tablet is backlit (as opposed to having an OLED or AMOLED screen). The Motorola Xyboard is no different: while it does have an impressive peak brightness of 457.26 cd/m² , it has a rather poor deepest black level of 0.64cd/m² . Why is the black level important? It’s important because the lower it is, the wider the potential contrast ratio is, which in turn is important because a wider contrast ratio means more values your device can display in greyscale, meaning more detail.

Color Gamut

Motorola Xyboard owners will probably notice after a while that their tablet does not handle its color performance as well as their LCD TV does, but to be fair, no tablet that we’ve ever reviewed does. The Motorola Xyboard has some issues with undersaturating greens and reds, while it wildly shifts blues to a more cyanish color. Additionally, the white point is more cyan than we’d like to see, but no tablet is perfect.

Battery Life

Considering that Motorola’s Xoom tablet is the former champion of battery life on TRI, it was a little baffling to get the results back on the Xyboard and see that it lost well over an hour on both the eBook reading and the video battery life. With eBook reading clocking in at 6 hours, 9 minutes, and video playback at 5 hours, 37 minutes, the Xyboard is a huge dropoff in comparison to the Xoom’s battery life.