The Motorola Xyboard 8.2, like its very close sibling the Xyboard 10.1 ($529 and up, 3 stars), is a great-looking Android tablet that costs too much for what you're getting. Since this Xyboard costs a little less, the Xyboard 8.2 is a slightly better buy than its brother. But it still doesn't manage to snag our Editors' Choice.

Physical Design, Pricing and Battery Life
Verizon tends to market Droids as terrifying killer robots which will scare your children and set your farm on fire. True to form, the Xyboard 8.2 looks like military technology from the future. The front is the usual black slab, with an 8.2-inch, 1280-by-800-pixel screen—the same number of pixels as on the 10.1-inch model, just denser.

Measuring 8.5 by 5.5 by 0.35 inches (HWD) and weighing 13.8 ounces, the Xyboard is still comfortable to hold in one hand, unlike a 10-inch tablet. It's the back that brings the military flavor: it's made of gray metal riveted to a soft-touch material around the edges. The power button, volume rocker, and main 5-megapixel camera are on the back. There's a VGA camera on the front. Like the Xyboard 10.1, the 8.2 has a non-removable battery and lacks a memory card slot.  

At $429 for a 16GB model and $529 for a 32GB unit, both with a two-year contract, the 8.2 comes in at $100 less than the larger Xyboard. Without a contract, you'll be paying $599 and $699.

The Xyboard is much more expensive than the T-Mobile Springboard 4G (3.5 stars), which runs $179 with contract and $429 without, and includes a T-Mobile HSPA+ modem. But it's competitive with the 16GB Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus (3.5 stars), which costs $449 when bundled with a Verizon hotspot on two-year contract, or $668 with a hotspot and no contract.

Battery life is a weakness here. I got a mere 4 hours, 4 minutes of continuous video playback time with the screen brightness turned up. That's shorter than most other small tablets we've tested, and less than I'd like all around.

Performance and Conclusions
The Xyboard 8.2 is pretty much a smaller clone of the 10.1, with most of the same components and the same software build, although it doesn't have the pop-up notepad software to work with the 10.1's capacitive stylus. I found it to perform pretty much identically to the larger tablet, so take a look at the Xyboard 10.1 review for details.

In short, this is a perfectly adequate Android Honeycomb tablet with the usual faults, primarily a surfeit of poorly-programmed third party apps available in the Android Market that don't look good on large screens. The 8.2-inch screen makes apps primarily designed for phones look less offensive than they do on 10.1-inch screens, though, simply by virtue of being smaller.

Our two favorite small tablets at the moment are the Amazon Kindle Fire ($199, 4 stars) and Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet ($249, 4 stars), both less expensive, humbler devices with a limited but high-quality app selection. They will satisfy the average mainstream user, but not folks looking for the full power of Android with apps like Adobe Photoshop Touch.

If you're interested in a small tablet with integrated wireless, we'd also suggest looking at the T-Mobile Springboard 4G. If you're in a location with T-Mobile service, it'll give you similar powers to the Xyboard, but at a considerably lower price.

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