IHS iSuppli says that there are no Long Term Evolution (LTE) components inside the 3G Android "Honeycomb" tablet. The research firm had this to say in a note issued today:
The Motorola XOOM is marketed to consumers as a device that is upgradable to 4G free of charge. The IHS iSuppli teardown reveals why XOOM owners must surrender their product back to the factory for a physical upgrade to 4G networking. There were no 4G components found in the XOOM tablet aside from a dummy miniPCIe card -- an obvious placeholder for the future LTE upgrade. However, Motorola did provide two MIMO antennas and a SIM card slot in preparation for the LTE upgrade.Motorola has said that the LTE upgrade should be available 90 days after Thursday's launch. (See Tablet Wars: iPad 2 vs Android 3.0 and Tablet Wars: Who's Xooming Whom?)
The 10.1-inch display of the Xoom is reminiscent of the Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPad. IHS iSuppli, however, lists a number of differences on the new machine:
- The Xoom has an Nvidia Corp. (Nasdaq: NVDA) dual-core Tegra 2 apps processor for faster running of software and processes.
- With 1GB synchronous dynamic random access memory (SDRAM) onboard, the Xoom has "nearly four times as much SDRAM for code storage than Apple's A4 microprocessor employed, further boosting performance."
- The Xoom features both a 2-megapixel front-facing camera and a 5-megapixel primary camera.
- The Motorola device has a multitude of sensors, including an electronic compass, a 3-axis accelerometer, a 3-axis gyroscope and a pressure monitor.
— Dan Jones, Site Editor, Light Reading Mobile