During a press briefing at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Motorola officially unveiled its much-anticipated Xoom tablet. Available exclusively on the Verizon network, Xoom will come with Android 3.0, codenamed Honeycomb, a new version of Android that brings substantial improvements aimed at boosting the platform's suitability for tablets.

Motorola intends to ship the Xoom during the first quarter of 2011, and update it in the second quarter to add support for Verizon's nascent LTE network. It will likely be the highest-profile Honeycomb launch device and will serve as Android's answer to the iPad. The device is powered by NVIDIA's Tegra 2 SoC, with a dual-core 1Ghz Cortex A9 processor. Motorola says that the Xoom will deliver a "console-like" 3D gaming experience and support for playing high definition video. The Xoom's 10.1-inch display renders at a resolution of 1280x800, edging past the iPad's 1024x768 resolution.

As expected, Honeycomb will come with a richer and more tablet-friendly user interface. Google offered a sneak peek this week of some of the features, including the new "holographic" user interface. It's much richer and more fluid than Android 2.x, with behaviours that were unambiguously tailored to the tablet form factor. A demo video published on Google's official mobile blog offers a tantalizing first look. Among the numerous improvements that are visible in the video, one that caught my eye was the more Chrome-like browser interface.

Although Android 3 is developed to take advantage of the NVIDIA SoC's processing power and graphical prowess in devices where it is available, Google has denied rumors that Honeycomb will require Tegra 2 or necessitate a dual-core processor. This suggests that it could still be hypothetically possible for Honeycomb to be backported to existing tablet devices, such as Samsung's Galaxy Tab.

The Xoom appears destined to be a Verizon exclusive and will help showcase the carrier's 4G network. Video chat over WiFi, 3G, and 4G is one of the capabilities that Motorola is touting for the device (it has both a front-facing and rear camera). Pricing hasn't been announced yet, but the company is already showing off some of the accessories, including a dock and a wireless keyboard.

The Xoom is an ambitious product with impressive hardware specifications and a software experience that has the potential to be much better than the current stock of Android tablets. If Google and Motorola nail the execution and bring it to market in a timely manner, it could be the first serious competitor for the iPad.