Motorola Xoom price official: $799 unsubsidized on Verizon, $600 for WiFi-only
engadget.com
engadget.com
I find it very hard to believe they're both subsidised that heavily by their respective backers, so why (other than supporting the price of overpriced 3.7" tablets, er smartphones) is the 3G enabled tablet so much more expensive?
I wish for a "Nexus One" of Honeycomb tablets...
Which is sad, the Xoom looks like a great tablet.
The Xoom also has the Honeycomb advantage; I wonder what iPad 2's UI will look like. I think you underestimate how impressed average people will be when casually browsing tablets in stores. Honeycomb is gorgeous.
Nobody bought the iPad because of specs, aside from the battery life. If you think they did, you still do not understand the market, and are probably baffled that people are not buying Intel based tablets.
What? This makes no sense at all. How are those two thoughts related at all? And Android runs real Java, not "knocked off" Java.
> And as good as honeycomb cereal is, Android is pretty sluggish and ugly compared to iOS. iOS is <I><b>gorgeous.</b></I>
Oh I see, you're a troll. I'll respond anyway. Android is not sluggish compared to iOS; especially given that Honeycomb isn't even out in the wild running on real devices yet, this statement is totally unfounded. I'll grant you that iOS is gorgeous, though. But so is Honeycomb. :)
> Nobody bought the iPad because of specs, aside from the battery life. If you think they did, you still do not understand the market, and are probably baffled that people are not buying Intel based tablets.
iPad was a new product in a new form factor. It was a "game-changer". Nobody bought it based on specs because they had nothing to compare it to. I'm definitely not suggesting that people will buy new tablets based on specs either, but it will matter that the two devices are in the same league.
Additionally, the specs are irrelevant when comparing the iPad, which runs C applications, to something that must ram everything through a Java VM. And I mean, irrelevant to geeks, as the platforms are so different that it is impossible to compare them based on specifications. To normal people, the specs are completely, 100%, totally irrelevant, aside from battery life.
The new iteration of Android has some UI tweaks, but it's still awfully busy. It's clearly made for the power user who cares about specs. I mean, yeah, you can see two things at once. Ordinary people will just say "I typed in the wrong window." It seems like an important spec to be able to have an arbitrary number of things going on at once on the device, and their Expose knockoff is, well, an Expose knockoff, but I just wonder if they thought this through all the way, or if they are thinking in a Microsoft sort of way, that one more bullet point on a spec sheet will make that sale.
Only two things matter: The price, and the OS.
No tablet is even coming close to competing the iPad to this day only because of these two things. I'm not sure I actually have to dig into the mass grave of all "iPad killers" to prove my point.
Honeycomb based Android tablets, for the first time, are getting it right on both counts. You may not like Honeycomb and that would be your personal taste, but both feature wise and aesthetics/attractiveness/usability wise, it is looking great in comparison to iOS 4.x.
We learned from the iPod competitors that cheaper price and cheaper looking devices, even with more features/storage, won't win. So why not go head to head with a similarly priced, similar build quality device? I feel like Apple gets this win-win perception. Competitor releases a cheaper product, it is called a piece of junk that is DOA. Competitor releases a similar or higher priced product, it is overpriced and DOA.
Plus, "[a]ny tablet with a higher price than the iPad fails to generate any kind of lasting interest, I don't see why it will be different here"? Isn't a bit early to say? There has been only one real competitor, and while the Galaxy Tab hasn't taken the world by storm, it seems to be doing a tidy business.
Which tablet higher priced than the iPad failed to generate any interest? Xoom should the first Honeycomb based tablet. Given how close the Xoom is the current iPad in price but blows it away in specs, hard to see why it should be priced lower than the current iPad.
Guess we'll have to wait and see though!
I think I smell the reek of death. Now if the exhume was only say, $300 for the wifi only unit, they'd have something. Even $400 would be too much for what consumers will call a "generic iPad" as even the hard-up could find another $99 if they already had $400 to drop on a toy like a tablet.
Exhume indeed. This may illustrate to clever marketers that for a lot of people, the obvious and seemingly correct pronunciation for a clever brand might bite them. My grandpa called Qwest "queue west" as they made him wait for a customer service agent too long for his liking. He was onto something.
Hell I am writing this on my iPad, and I still think it is an awful name.
On edit: you missed my main point, which is that Xoom has no clear pronunciation. Is it "zoom?" I am supposing that is what they want me to call it, but "exhume" is what it looks like.