Difference Between Cisco Cius and Motorola Xoom

Cisco Cius and Motorola Xoom are both Android tablets. Motorola Xoom was one of the early tablet devices released to the market with android 3.0 (Honeycomb); a dedicated Android tablet OS. Cisco Cius release is expected towards the end of July 2011. The following article discusses the similarities and interesting differences between the two tablets.

Cisco Cius

Cisco Cius is an Android tablet, which will be released towards the end of July 2011. It is reported that the Cisco Tablet will be focused towards the enterprise market with Cisco’s own teleconferencing facilities on board.

Cisco Cius is a 7 inch tablet device featuring a capacitive multi touch screen with 1024 x 600 resolution. The display is reportedly a TFT display supporting many hand gestures for interactivity. Cisco Cius is well optimized for Portrait use. It is reported that Cisco Cius runs Android 2.2 (Froyo). The device has a single core 1.6 GHz CPU with 1 GB memory and 32 GB internal storage. The new Cisco Cius can be also used as a desktop computer by docking it to a new Cisco desk phone.

From the outlook it appears that the Cisco Cius is more focused towards the enterprise market. We make that statement with not mere speculation, but with features provided by the new tablet. Cisco Cius is designed to be used with “HD media station”; a dock designed for Cisco Cius, which is also an advanced telecommunications system complete with a phone handset. The “HD media station” includes three USB ports, a display port, a mouse, a keyboard, a headphone jack and a power over Ethernet jack. When docked on “HD media station” the Cius can utilize a key board, mouse and can display video using the Display port. However scaling in the video output is reportedly low quality. If the company has a Cisco phone system users will be able to take calls from where ever they are using their desk number.

Communication applications such as email, telephony, voice mail, video conferencing and chat play a key role in Cisco Cius. The phone application is available with three panes. It has a contact list, a dial pad and active or missed call alerts all in one screen. When a voice mail is received to the mail box it will be converted to text and delivered visually. A picture with a status icon will show the availability of the contact person. If the icon with the person’s image is tapped it will be possible to make a call. A special feature of the chat application is the easy switch to a phone call or a video call. One will be surprised if the high quality video conferencing facility of Cisco is not integrated to Cisco Cius. The new tablet provides high definition video with Cisco TelepresenceTM solution interoperability. The front facing camera has auto focus with 2 X digital zoom. Available TelepresenceTM rooms are in a pane to left side.

Unified inbox widget occupies a huge portion of the Cisco Cius home screen. It has details of the 5 contacts taken from the corporate directory based on interactivity with them. The unified inbox widget will also show the availability of the person via email, chat and phone. The contacts application is also populated from the corporate directory. This is an excellent feature for a tablet aligned with enterprise use. The calendar is also another interesting productivity application available in Cisco Cius. The calendar allows starting conference calls directly from meeting appointments available in the calendar.

Cisco has created their own online application store with applications supporting the Cisco Cius. This application store is called “App HQ store” and companies can create their own app stores in this infrastructure. However this service is not available for free of charge.

It will be to the relief of enterprise users to know that all data available in Cisco Cius is encrypted to a special chip. Meanwhile viewing Microsoft office applications is made available by Quickoffice. All in all Cisco Cius will stand out from the rest of tablet competition as an enterprise based solution considering it’s neat support for communication and productivity.

Motorola Xoom

Motorola Xoom is an Android tablet released by Motorola in early 2011. Motorola Xoom tablet was initially released to the market with Honeycomb (Android 3.0) installed. It is also reported that the Wi-Fi version as well as the Verizon branded versions of the tablet support Android 3.1, making Motorola Xoom one of the very first tablets to run Android 3.1.

Motorola Xoom boasts a 10.1 inch light responsive display with 1280 x 800 screen resolution. The Xoom has a multi touch screen and a virtual keypad is available in Portrait and landscape mode. The Xoom is designed more for landscape mode use. However, both landscape and portrait modes are supported. The screen is reportedly impressively responsive. Input can be given as voice commands as well. In addition to all above Motorola Xoom includes a compass, a gyroscope (to calculate orientation and proximity), a magnetometer (measure strength and direction of magnetic field), a 3 axis accelerometer, a light sensor and a barometer. Motorola Xoom has a 1 GB RAM and 32 GB internal storage.

With Android 3.0 on board Motorola Xoom provide 5 customizable home screens. All these home screens can be navigated with touch of a finger and shortcuts and widgets can be added and removed. Unlike earlier versions of Android the batter indicator, clock, signal strength indicator and notifications are at the very bottom of the screen. All applications can be accessed using the newly introduced icon at the top right hand corner of the home screen.

Honeycomb in Motorola Xoom also includes productivity applications such as calendar, calculator, clock and etc. many applications can be downloaded from Android market place as well. QuickOffice Viewer also comes installed with Motorola Xoom allowing users to view documents, presentations and spreadsheets.

A completely re-designed Gmail client is available with Motorola Xoom. Many reviews on the device claims that the interface is loaded with many UI components and it’s far from simple. However users can also configure Email accounts based on POP, IMAP. Google talk is available as the instant messaging application for Motorola Xoom. Though the video quality of the Google talk video chat is not of the best quality the traffic is well managed.

Motorola Xoom includes the Music application redesigned for Honeycomb. The interface is aligned with the 3D feel of the android version. Music can be categorized by artist and album. Navigation through albums is easy and very interactive.

Motorola Xoom supports up to 720p video play back. The tablet reports an average 9 hour battery life while looping a video and browsing web. A native YouTube application is also available with Motorola Xoom. A 3D effect with a wall of videos is presented to users. Android Honeycomb finally presents video editing software named “Movie Studio”. Though many are not very impressed with the performance of the software, it was a much needed addition to the tablet OS. Motorola Xoom has a 5 mega pixel camera with an LED flash at the back of the device. The camera gives good quality images and video. The front facing 2 mega pixel camera can be used as a web cam and gives standard quality images for its specifications. Adobe Flash player 10 comes installed with Android.

The web browser available with Motorola Xoom is reportedly good in performance. It allows tabbed browsing, chrome bookmark sync and incognito mode. Web pages will be loaded and quickly and efficiently. But there will be occasions the browser will be recognized as an Android Phone.

What is the difference between Cisco Cius and Motorola Xoom?

Cisco Cius and Motorola Xoom are both Android tablets. Motorola Xoom is a 10 inch tablet and Cisco Cius is expected to be a 7 inch tablet. While Motorola Xoom was released during the first quarter of 2011 the tablet market is eagerly waiting the official release of Cisco Cius. Xoom is released by Motorola and Cius will be released by Cisco. Cisco Cius is expected to have Android 2.2, a quite out dated Android version initially meant for phones. Motorola Xoom is way ahead of the android version used in the device with initially releasing with Android 3.0 and allowing upgrade for Android 3.1 later. Motorola Xoom is more focused on the consumer market while Cisco Cius is meant for enterprise use. The most glaring difference between the two devices is that Cisco Cius is designed to be used with “HD media station”; a sophisticated telecommunication system complete with a handset. Video conferencing has a higher quality in Cisco Cius than that of Motorola Xoom. Motorola Xoom has only the standard UI provided by Android while Cisco Cius has extensively improved the UI with enterprise use in mind. Applications supporting Motorola Xoom can be downloaded from the Android market but Cisco Cius has created its own app store. The application store created by Cisco is called the “App HQ store” and allows companies to create their own personal app store within this infrastructure. This is a unique feature from all other tablet competitors in the market including Motorola.