Leak: 10.1 inch and 8.2 inch second generation Motorola Xoom Android tablets

Remember the Motorola Xoom, the fist Android Honeycomb tablet to hit the market? Don’t worry if you don’t. It was a horrible product, and pretty much every Android tablet after it, except for maybe the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Asus Transformer, has been equally as bad. It’s not that Android tablets are built poorly, it’s just Honeycomb is so … there’s no word to express the amount of disappointment we have for the obviously rushed OS Google put out there. On a lighter note, we’ve got some information to share about the successor to the Xoom, aptly called the Xoom 2. There’s going to be not just 1, but 2 of them. Both will be ridiculously thin, both will have a dual core processor, and both will come with some sort of built-in connectivity; likely LTE. Where things get different is when you talk about screen sizes. They’ll be a 10.1 inch version that’s just 9 mm thick, can capture HD video, and will support Netflix HD streaming. There’s also going to be a smaller 8.2 inch version dubbed the “Xoom 2 Media Edition” that has an IPS display with an anti-glare coating, integrated IR blaster so you can point it at your television and stereo, built-in subwoofer, and it’s also supposed to be “splash proof”, which is useful if you ever use your tablet in the can.

We’ve got no idea when these things are going to come out or how much they’ll cost, but if they still run Android Honeycomb then we frankly don’t care. If these things don’t ship with Ice Cream Sandwich, the next version of Google’s mobile operating system that merges the tablet and smartphone variants of Android, then the second generation Xooms are dead in the water. In early 2012 we’ll be looking forward to quad core tablets and the third generation iPad anyway, so how can these compete?