CES 2011: Motorola unveils new line of devices with Xoom, Atrix

Motorola gave audiences at CES 2011 a peak at their new tablet, the Xoom. Rob Pegoraro gives us a closer look at the supposed iPad-killer:

The most promising iPad competitor at CES may be Motorola's Xoom, but it's a little too soon to write that in pen instead of pencil. I got a quick tour of this Android tablet computer at Motorola's booth this afternoon that both outlined what could make it an effective rival to Apple's bestseller and left reasons to think it might not do the trick.

In its favor, the 1.5-lb. Xoom--pronounced "zoom" and written by Motorola in all-caps--offers a slightly larger screen than the iPad, at 10.1 inches versus the Apple tablet's 9.7, and with a higher 1280-by-720 pixel resolution than the iPad's 1024-by-768 resolution. It includes both a 2-megapixel camera on the front and a 5-MP camera on the back, combined with Google's own Google Talk video-calling software built in. That should be a step up from the third-party applications and services bundled by other vendors.

At the Consumer Electronics Show 2011 in Las Vegas Motorola wowed attendees with their smartphone-turned laptop, the Atrix. Hayley Tsukayama profiled the new device:

It's a smartphone. It's a computer. It's the Atrix! Motorola's getting a lot of press this morning after announcing its much-hyped competitor to the iPad, the Xoom. But the Atrix, also unveiled at Motorola's press conference yesterday, is generating quite a lot of buzz as well.

The novel idea behind the Atrix is that it's a smartphone that plugs into the shell of a laptop. Unlike the doomed Palm Foleo, which synced a computer with a Palm Treo, all the computing power in the Atrix is in the smartphone.

The phone, which Motorola is calling the "world's most powerful smartphone," has some great guts: an NVIDIA Tegra 2, four-inch display, a front-facing camera and a rear-facing 5MP camera, 1 GB RAM, 16GB on-board memory, and a microSD card slot. It runs Android 2.2 FroYo. The laptop, which is being dubbed a "webtop," has an 11.6-inch display, two USB ports and a full keyboard.