Hands on: Motorola Xoom 2 review

It's not even a year since we saw the first Motorola Xoom, but already we're looking at its next generation - cunningly named the Motorola Xoom 2.

The new Xoom is thinner, lighter and faster than the old iteration, as you might expect. We're talking 253.9 mm x 173.6 mm x 8.8 mm dimensions, 599g weight and a new TI OMAP 1.2GHz dual-core processor.

We've taken some lovely video with the new device - check it out if you can't be bothered to read on.

And it actually shows in the speed of operation - although the fact it's running the new, more efficient version of Android 3.2, but tapping, prodding and swiping across the screen has a lot more snap to it.

However, despite having a high definition screen, we're not sure this is going to be your ultimate media machine in this day and age.

There's only 16GB of internal memory on board, with no microSD slot on offer this time, meaning once you bunged a few movies and a bunch of songs on there, you'll find you're out of space pretty quickly.

No worry though, as Motorola is confident that cloud storage is going to be enough for you anyway. To that end, MotoCast is on board, allowing you to access a whole PC or Mac's-worth of music, video and documents on the go... providing you have a Wi-Fi signal, that is.

In our tests, it's seemed pretty good, albeit a little slow when trawling through the folders. We've seen this kind of thing before when phones and tablets can connect up to a PC when in a home network, but this one of the first times we've seen it remotely possible from the off with a big name attached to it.

We'll be interested to see whether it works over a stable Wi-Fi connection... but given they can be a little hard to come by out and about, we're not sure how useful this feature will be.

The camera application is quite snappy though... if you'll excuse the pun. We've seen awful tablet cameras in our time, but the well-placed controls coupled with the decent speed of snapping had us impressed with the demo model.

Something we were less impressed with was the speed of the auto-rotate, should you want to flip from landscape to portrait. It took a couple of seconds to register the change and it just looks clumsy compared to the speed of the iPad 2.

The auto-rotate also threw in a few bugs as well, as despite the internet browser being super-nippy when it comes to Wi-Fi browsing, and while Flash video loaded up well, when we jumped from landscape to portrait mode the browser just crashed. We're sure it's pre-production stuff, but it doesn't fill us with confidence.

Motorola Xoom 2 - Early verdict

While we're all for tablets getting sleeker and faster, we're not sure that the Motorola Xoom 2 can be a real winner in the tablet market given the amount of competition already around.

Had it come with Ice Cream Sandwich from the off (apparently it's coming 'soon'), packed a huge amount of storage or been one of the fastest on the market, we might have been a little bit more impressed with the slightly buggy software we saw on show today.

However, we don't want to sound all doomy and gloomy about Motorola's latest effort, as there's a lot here we like too: the screen is nifty, the dimensions are easy to handle and there's a feature that allows you to hold your thumb on the screen to grip and not have it interfere with scrolling and swiping.

We're going to be bringing you our full Motorola Xoom 2 review in the next fortnight, so stay classy TechRadar... and thanks for stopping by.