Motorola XOOM Wi-Fi + Verizon Wireless Tablet PC Review

Motorola Xoom Battery Life

Battery life is very important on tablets and the Motorola Xoom uses a 7.4V Lithium Ion Polymer battery. This battery is rated as being 3250 mAh and 24.1 Wh and Motorola says that it should last for a healthy 10 hours of Wi-Fi browsing and video browsing or for 3.3 days of straight MP3 playback.

We wanted to test out the battery on the Motorola Xoom, but we did so using our own methods. When we travel we use our tablet PC to watch movies. Most of the time when we are on a plane or stuck in a car on a road trip it is during the day and you have to crank up the screen brightness in order to be able to see anything. We increased the screen brightness to 100% and left Wi-Fi enabled as with inflight internet and smartphone teethering being more adopted we felt that was the best way to test tablets for our readers. Some sites turn off Wi-Fi and lower the screen brightness, but we don’t feel that is something most people do in the real world.

We wanted to put a full length movie on our tablet, so we turned to Slysoft for a solution. We were able to use AnyDVD HD and CloneDVD mobile to ‘backup’ our store bought DVD movie on our laptop. For this review we used the movie ‘Something Borrowed‘.

We converted the movie from MPEG2 to MP4 at a video bitrate of ~2500 kbps. We then transferred the file to the tablets with the included USB data cables. We then played the movie with the built-in gallery player until the each tablet shut down when the battery died.

The Motorola Xoom lasted for nearly 7 hours, which is enough time to watch 3-4 movies depending on how long they are! The Motorola Xoom lasted 37 minutes or 10% longer than the ASUS Transformer that we tested alongside the Xoom. These are very impressive battery life numbers and it shows that these tablets are great for use on the go.

Once your tablet PC battery dies you want to get it fully recharged as soon as possible, so we timed how long it takes to get the tablet back to a fully charged status indicator. The Motorola Xoom was able to fully recharge in just over 2.5 hours using the wall charger that comes with the tablet when you buy it. The ASUS Transformer took just shy of three hours to recharge for comparison sake.

Our testing shows the Motorola Xoom has very good battery life as we found the battery to last 10% longer than the ASUS Transformer and the Xoom was able to recharge 16% faster.

During our testing and use of the Motorola Xoom we found ourselves going two days between charges. We didn’t turn it off when not in use, so the Wi-Fi and 3G were left running. Since it takes just around 2.5 hours to charge it also easily charges overnight or if you have a few hours of down time.