Now before we begin, I must say that this is not the first we’ve ever heard of this tablet, nor is it the first we’ve ever seen it in real life (If I remember right, we snuck a tiny peek at it at CES 2011 but were sworn to secrecy.) Now we’ve got our grubby mitts on it and we’ve been given the opportunity to compare it not only to the Motorola XOOM tablet, but the iPad 2, both for size and for weight. This is a tablet that’s made of metal, this is a tablet that’s made for Honeycomb, this is a tablet that is nowhere near ready for release.

This tablet is a relatively attractive looking piece of machinery, but with the tablets that have been released just this past 24 hours, we’re not as thrilled as we otherwise may have been. Given that and the fact that not only is this tablet not displaying Honeycomb (AT&T is not yet allowed to do so, they say,) but the test copy of Android 2.1 Eclair they’ve got flying around in here is so buggy that it was jumping back and forth across the screen as it sat in the display holster.

This is a tablet that’s perhaps got a future in the business of people seeking out the odd, but without a working copy of an Android OS to look at, I and we can’t really make too big of a judgement in any direction.

The hardware is heavy, but not heavier than the Motorola XOOM. It’s heavier than the iPad 2, and definitely heavier than the Samsung Galaxy Tab devices revealed today, and it’s basically the same thickness as the XOOM. Behold a weird one!