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Comment by Kylekramer | Hacker News Reader

You can ignore it, you can say it is weak, you can say the iPad will crush all comers, but there is competition now. Both in quality and commerically.

Of course, as always, it is hard to get a man to understand something when his job requires that he does not. For example, where are all these bad reviews for the Xoom? Most put it a bit below the iPad.

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Here's the basic problems with the XOOM: it is priced higher than the iPad, isn't much better, and has less apps designed for it. It has more ports, but consumers don't seem to care.

A lot of the old PC vs Mac decision making factors in on the consumer side. Cheaper has its own quality, but combined with Apple's design - well. It is very much if the Mac mini was priced at $199 versus the rest of the PC market at $399.

I think HP will be seriously competitive and Microsoft might finally give up on the Windows 7 tablets and get someone to make WP7 tablets. Honeycomb looks good, but cellphone makers seem to have a lot of problems crossing to tablets because they love their business model with subsidies from the carriers. I think the first company that has a better iPod touch based on Android, webOS, or WP7 will be the sign post for their tablet to be a true iPad competitor. I think it will show they get the whole market.

Samsung is releasing a model of the Galaxy in that vein. No phone, just a media consumption device.

Good luck trying to get an update for it.

It's barely priced higher than the equivalent iPad model. $729 for the 3G/32GB iPad vs. $799 for the 3G/32GB Xoom.

IMHO, Honeycomb is far beyond the current iOS iteration for iPad. Granted I'm a Google services oriented person and Apple will most likely be releasing a new version of iOS for the iPad 2 in March, but apples to apples comparison: I've owned both now and I prefer Android. Not for "openness", or because I don't like Apple, but because the functionality is just more intuitive and convenient. Google really did good with Honeycomb. Most specifically is the tabbed browsing (though apps like Google Reader still don't work correctly).

I realize there's no WiFi model at the moment to compete with the iPad's lower end choices but I would imagine that's coming. Obviously there's a serious lack of apps for Android tablets as the Xoom is the first major tablet to be put out. I think these problems will be solved in time and only be a concern to early adopters.

tldr; Android is serious competition for Apple and without some serious innovation they're at serious risk of falling behind. I purposely purchased my Xoom so that the 14-day return window include the March 2nd iPad2 announcement, so I'm definitely not staying with the Xoom if Apple pulls a rabbit out of their hat.

not having a wifi only version is just boneheaded.

I can't really imagine why they wouldn't have released one. The only plausible reason I can come up with is that their manufacturing costs couldn't come close what Apple was able to do to put out their $499 16GB WiFi model.

FWIW, I totally agree with what you said. Honeycomb is looking really good - to the point where using iOS feels restricted to me. (Bought mine yesterday and not changing it for anything - to me the stock Google ROM and unlockable bootloader have huge potential for development and trying out custom ROMs.)

Another big winner for me (on any Android 2.2+ device): tethering via portable WiFi hotspot. Although it's much more satisfying when I run my Nexus One on my AT&T unlimited data plan than when I get molested by Verizon for my data usage on the Xoom 3GB plan.

Theoretically this feature will be coming to iOS soon (it's already present in the Verizon iPhone 4 refresh), depending on how badly AT&T decides to continue to gouge their customers.

The only iPad price point that matter is the $499 wifi version. Seriously.

The rest are there to capture some price discrimination value, and that's all.

That's the key. A XOOM is $800 and an iPad is $500. It is the old Dell versus Apple thing. The cheapest price unit sticks.

  Most put it a bit below the iPad.

Thats what he is saying, all aiming for #2. Why the customer buy bit below gadget for higher price.

A 32GB 3G iPad is $729. EDIT The Xoom costs $800, has a higher-resolution screen, two cameras, and the price includes an upgrade to 4G (whenever Verizon and Motorola sort that out). So I think it's actually pretty close. Well, at least the hardware is, which I know is not the whole story :-)

Considering the iPad doesn't come on contract it would probably make more sense to compare it to the $799 contractless Xoom

Almost all the non-techies I know have the WiFi iPad, not the 3G version. I'm not sure of the exact sales figures, but I would expect the WiFi iPad is much more popular. Effectively the XOOM is competing against something that costs $500, not $729 + recurring fee.

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