The new 10 inch Motorola Xoom which will be released in Australia with the new Honeycomb OS, is tipped to go on sale at Telstra with a price tag of between $795 and $895, which is cheaper than the original price tag for the 7 inch Samsung Tab.In the USA where the device has been on sale for several weeks, the device has sold poorly due to its $800 price tag. The Apple iPad 2 in coparison has sold five times the 100,000 units sold by Motorola.
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According to sources Telstra is set to offer the new Motorola device on a plan for as low as $59 a month with a data card.
The Honeycomb device is set to be released along with the new Motorola Atrix handset in mid May.
Telstra declined to comment other than saying it was examining several tablets based on the new Honeycomb version of Android, which – unlike earlier Android versions – has been specifically developed for tablet devices.
The Xoom has been the first tablet to use Honeycomb. While it has earned good reviews, a Deutsche Bank report last week claimed sales had been “modest”, with around 100,000 sold in the first few weeks on the US market, to which it has so far been confined.
Powered by a 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 dual-core processor, the Xoom has a 10.1-inch touchscreen with 1200 X 800 resolution.
While most reviewers are impressed with the new Honeycomb 3.0 operating system, feedback from tech sites is mixed due to the sparse number of Android tablet apps. While this all appears to be bad news for Google and Motorola, it is still too early to give up just yet. Android phones did not get off to the greatest start either, but Google kept working at them until now they are big sellers. Perhaps with time they will be able to do the same with a tablet.
