Wireless Performance
We've overhauled the evaluation of Wi-Fi performance. For background information, check out page 10 of Acer Iconia Tab A500: A Tablet With Honeycomb 3.1. If you're not sure how throughput, latency, processing time, and response time all tie together, we go over that on page 10 of Apple's iPad 2 Review: Tom's Goes Down The Tablet Rabbit Hole.
Two scenarios are being tested here:
- Five feet, line-of-sight: The wireless device is set five feet from the router without any obstructions.
- 20 feet, no line-of-sight: The wireless device is set 20 feet from the router and there are three drywall obstructions in our testing environment that reflect the possible degradation you might see in an indoor environment.
All devices idle for two minutes before testing in order to prevent power-saving rules in the operating system from affecting wireless performance.
The Xoom Family Edition's wireless performance is very similar to the original Xoom. It's disappointing that we can't connect to 5 GHz network on this device, though. Those networks appear on the list of detected APs, but Android always reports that they're too far away, even when the tablet is within a few feet of the access point.