If Best Buy’s $800 price for Motorola’s Xoom the company’s powerful Android 3.0 tablet seems too big a pill to swallow, maybe you’ll find it a bit easier with Verizon’s 24-month data plan, which lowers the price of the device to $600.
Of course, it means you’ll have to pay at least $20 per month for 1G of 3G data, which increases the overall cost considerably. But if you planned to purchase a data plan for the Xoom anyway, this deal might not be too shabby.
The Motorola Xoom will run on Google’s newest mobile operating system Android 3.0 “Honeycomb.” But according to Jha, his company plans to fully embrace Android across all its mobile devices especially now that Nokia has committed itself to Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS.
“I am as focused on Android as I ever have been,” Jha told reporters. “As a result of Nokia adopting Microsoft it’s possible that some of the other players concentrate on Android.”
The tablet market is heating up, with new releases being announced on a regular basis. But as we’ve mentioned before, Motorola’s Xoom is one of the few tablets that could, theoretically, compete with Apple’s iPad, which currently dominates tablet sales. Analysts believe tablet makers will collectively sell around 50 million tablets in 2011.
The Motorola Xoom will ship with Android 3.0 (codenamed Honeycomb) running on Nvidia's Tegra 2 processor, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, 32GB of onboard storage (expandable via SD), a 2-megapixel camera on the front, a 5-megapixel camera with dual LED flash on the back, a micro USB 2.0 port, HDMI out, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, as well as Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR. The 10.1-inch tablet has a 1280x800 display resolution. Battery life is said to peak at about 10 hours of video playback. The device will launch in Q1 2011 with 3G functionality, later upgradeable to LTE 4G, and will launch with a LTE 4G model in Q2.
