The Motorola Xoom ad aired during the Superbowl and it definitely got some buzz going since it appeared to mock the iconic 1984 Apple commercial that is now a cult-classic. But behind all of the hype there is a tablet. Here’s the Motorola Xoom and you can decide if it’s for you or not.
All About The Motorola Xoom
First of all, the Motorola Xoom is not on sale yet. It is rumored to go on sale February 24th. But when it does officially go on sale it will cost around $799 for a 3G-enabled tablet with 32 GB of storage. The iPad 3G with 32 GB of storage is $729 for comparison.
There was a leaked “Best Buy” ad which confirmed that the Motorola Xoom will definitely be in that price range but the most interesting part of that ad was a restriction that seems a bit odd to have in place: You can’t enable Wi-Fi unless you sign up for at least one month of 3G service.
[engadget]
If this is true then I highly doubt anyone will be interested in it beyond the initial hype. You can see here in this image that the 3G rate plans will cost:
- 1GB Data $20/month
- 3GB Data $35/month
- 5GB Data $50/month
- 10GB Data $80/month
And yes in the ad you can clearly see it requires one month of 3G just to turn on WiFi. I either see a lot of bad press coming or a lot of hacking going on.
The Motorola Xoom Specs
The Motorola Xoom will be running the Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) operating system and it will have the following specs:
- 10.1″ HD Widescreen Display
- 1GB RAM
- Adobe Flash Support (meaning short battery life)
- 2MP camera for video chat
- 5MP rear camera with flash
- 720p video capture
- 1080p playback
- 3G upgradeable to 4G LTE
These are impressive specs. I wonder a few things:
- How will it compare to the iPad 2
- How will battery life be with all the focus on Flash and video
- Will the apps be “tablet ready” as some have pointed out they are not yet
I like that fact that it is upgradeable to LTE and it does seem like a feature-packed tablet. I am not sure how it will hold up in terms of battery life as that has not been mentioned and the only thing I see as a major issue here for Motorola is making people pay to use the WiFi….this won’t go over well and may not last long.
What do you think about this? No big deal?
The most popular iPad is the wifi-ony version (which also doesn’t require a contract to enable the wifi(!)), so there’s the Xoom’s main competitor right there and it is $300 cheaper.
As Apple said, they decided to be as aggressive on price as their huge economies of scale allowed. This is why everyone was gob-smacked when Apple originally released the iPad at half the $1,000 price every analyst in the world expected.
Why else does every iPad competitor either have a screen half the size of the iPad’s or a resistive, non-multi-touch screen, or be forced to come in at a price above the iPad?
To compete with an incumbent market leader, you always have to come in cheaper or the same price with more features. The Xoom is neither. That is Motorola’s problem.
-Mart
Martin,
Thanks for the comment! Stop by anytime.
I wanted to stay neutral with the post but it sure was hard to do that when I saw the requirement that you have to enable 3G just to turn on WiFi. That seems like they are trying to recoup a lot of costs at the expense of the user. And people say Apple is evil.
Well I’m with you on this one – Motorola is going to run into issues but not just for the sake of the WiFi – I think we are finally going to get a glimpse of the shortened battery life with all the support for Flash being emphasized….personally i’m a huge fan of HTML5 – an open standard.
Not True, I bought the Xoom at bestbuy yesterday, and the wifi works right out of the box and i didnt buy
any 3G packages (nor do i intend to) so far the only issue i have found is that most of the free apps I
have installed were written for android phones and when running are just “phone sized” on the screen, but
80% of the screen unused. Im hoping that changes quickly
Thanks David. Yeah at first they were going to require this but verizon decided not too which I think was a very good decision. How are you liking I so far???