Apparently Motorola doesn’t think the “Xoom” name has gained a lot of strength over the last several months.
The company’s newest Verizon-powered 4G LTE tablet will not be called the Xoom 2 as had been expected. Instead, the company came up with the name “Droid XyBoard.”
There are a couple reasons why the name change makes sense. First of all, the Xoom hasn’t made nearly the kind of splash Motorola and Verizon were expecting. Instead, it has just sort of fallen into the generic group of Android tablets.
Second, if there’s one name in the Android universe that almost everyone knows, it’s “Droid.” We were frankly quite surprised when the original Xoom was announced and did not carry the Droid moniker, which is owned by Verizon but has become synonymous with Motorola devices.
The Droid Xyboard carries name recognition for anyone who recognizes the popular line of Motorola smartphones.
However, because it’s owned by Verizon, the Droid brand only exists in the US. As a result, the new tablet will still be called the Xoom 2 in other markets like the UK.
As for the US version, technical specs are identical – a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor, 1 GB of RAM, 1280×800 resolution, and capacities from 16 GB to 64 GB. Prices are expected to range from $429 to $729 for the different models.
