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Motorola video: iPad is just a 'giant iPhone'

Motorola is not mincing words in critiquing the iPad as part of a promotional video teasing the rollout of its tablet at CES in Las Vegas next month.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
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Brooke Crothers

Motorola is already trying to elevate its unannounced tablet above the iPad in a promotional video released Sunday.

Of course, it's easy to claim just about anything when promoting a product that hasn't been formally announced and subjected to the rigors--and possible slings and arrows--of independent reviews.


But that hasn't stopped Motorola from denigrating the iPad by calling it a "giant iPhone" in the ad (above). That statement implies that Motorola's tablet isn't just a giant Droid X. We'll see, when Motorola shows its cards at CES next month.

What do we know about the tablet so far? Google's Andy Rubin demonstrated the new version of Google Maps running on a Motorola tablet at a recent conference. Rubin said the Motorola prototype was running Google's Honeycomb operating system, the next version of Android, on a dual-core Nvidia processor. At the conference, Rubin focused on the tablet's 3D image-processing capability.

The Motorola video does nothing to confirm the specs that Rubin discussed, though an animation of a buzzing bee at the end is a pretty clear reference to Honeycomb. Otherwise, the "Tablet Evolution" video conducts a tour of famous tablets throughout history, which includes citing the Rosetta Stone as providing "mutlilingual support," but at "low resolution."

So, guessing from some of the clues offered to date, the tablet will have a high-resolution screen powered by a dual-core Nvidia processor, packing a 3D graphics punch for which Nvidia is well known.