Motorola's XOOM Tablet To Cost $799; Wi-Fi Requires 3G Activation? 429
WrongSizeGlass writes "The price of Motorola's XOOM Tablet has been leaked in a Best Buy ad. The $799 Android 3-enabled tablet will be available starting Feb 24th. Though the price may seem a bit high, the most surprising detail is that activating the Xoom's Wi-Fi will require signing up for at least one month of Verizon's 3G service. Let's hope the fine print in the Best Buy ad turns out to be a typo."
Typos (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The price might seem a bit high (Score:5, Insightful)
Psychologically, that price is way high. There's a reason Apple wanted to target a $499 price point with the iPad. I think once they start getting into the mid-range laptop price range, it becomes a different kind of purchasing decision. At least, that's the reaction I've had as well as a few others I know. We were pretty excited about the Xoom, but once it comes time to lay down $800+, it stops being an impulse buy.
I hope this does not start an upward trend in price for tablets. Large-ish android phones will easily cannibalize its big brothers if the price differential is that great.
Re:The price might seem a bit high (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. 799 is a low end of the estimates people had for the iPad last year. Now that flash memory and display technologies have had about 12 months to mature from the introduction of the ipad, prices for competitors should at least be lower than Apple's price point for the low end 3G ipad. I don't think it is completely fair to judge the XOOM against the wifi ipad since I think all of the XOOMs will have 3g, but 150 dollars more than Apple is nuts.
Re:it's android... (Score:5, Insightful)
You forget about this: http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/11/01/19/2322215/Motorola-Sticks-To-Guns-On-Locking-Down-Android [slashdot.org]
Re:Who would buy this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who would buy this?
Several million people.
When $600 gets you a six-core desktop with 8 GB of RAM and a decent video card, why would you waste your time with a crippled tablet that costs more? The PC is a versatile machine that can do *anything*
... except be portable.
I'm against tablets costing over $400
Miniaturization costs money and tablets require some extra R&D because they need an OS/apps that aren't already on store shelves.
It's fun to rant and all, but products aren't priced just by how many FLOPs they perform.
Re:The price might seem a bit high (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see, for that price I can get a 17" laptop with a triple core CPU, 4GB RAM, 640GB hard drive, lightscribe DL DVDRW. Oh, and I can watch a movie without having to hold it, read an ebook without having to hold it, and use full fledged applications on it.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834157424&cm_re=17%22_laptop-_-34-157-424-_-Product [newegg.com]
Why folks would buy a tablet they have to hold with way less functionality, for more money, I just don't get.
I think if your operating philosophy requires that you conclude tens of millions of people making a specific purchase decision must be idiots you should re-evaluate that philosophy because it obviously provides little to no predictive power.
Re:The price might seem a bit high (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see, for that price I can get a 17" laptop with a triple core CPU, 4GB RAM, 640GB hard drive, lightscribe DL DVDRW. Oh, and I can watch a movie without having to hold it, read an ebook without having to hold it, and use full fledged applications on it.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834157424&cm_re=17%22_laptop-_-34-157-424-_-Product [newegg.com]
Why folks would buy a tablet they have to hold with way less functionality, for more money, I just don't get.
Remind us - how much does that laptop weigh again? And how thick is it? You pay a significant premium for portability - in terms of higher cost, lower performance, or both.
Re:The price might seem a bit high (Score:3, Insightful)
It's starting to look like Apple has set the bar too high for it's competitors in the pad market. Everything is starting to look like cheap junk or else it has problems with costing about what the iPad does or even more. For once it seems that Apples price point may actually not be massively outrageous as usual. Also all the guys with droid phones at work are starting to notice that the guys who have iphones have systems that work smoother. A couple have even stated they plan to get an iphone as soon as they can now that it's available on verizon. The ipads I've seen are the same way. Everything just flows. There's more to making a system work than throwing hardware together and hacking some software together.
Re:Damn... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:If you can't be better, at least be more expens (Score:1, Insightful)
webOS Tablets on Wednesday (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The price might seem a bit high (Score:5, Insightful)
More likely, they factored in
- huge quantity discounts on all parts, especially screens
- good revenues from ancillary sales from their various "stores". Android thingies cannot really do that (fewer stores, sparser stores, revenues are mainly Google's and others', not manufacturers')
- need for a low-end, cheap version to advertize, betting their customers would go for the high-end versions, whose margins are way higher ($15 extra materials costs, $300 extra price)
Re:The price might seem a bit high (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:At this rate (Score:4, Insightful)
I think this is a function of the fact that there are more peripherals for Apple now, so there's more things to break. When the "It just works" campaign started, there was hardly anything available that wasn't Apple produced, so yeah, things "Just worked" in most instances, but you had an extremely limited choice of what you could use. Now that Apple products have a larger ecosystem, they are running into the same problems as PCs... and thus the migration away from the Apple price premiums for basically no benefit.
On the flip side, the non-tech people are liking the Apple garden as much or more than before, because iOS is very gentle and easy for the non-tech savvy; they have no need for flexibility and the large icons and limited customizability of the whole thing is perfect for them.
So no, I doubt the iPad 2 is going to murder the Android tablets in terms of functionality, usability, price or any other technical metric. I don't see iOS having any significant changes between now and the advent of the iPad 2. The latest iterations of Android absolutely destroy iOS in terms of usability, speed, stability, flexibility and visual interface.
You forget how apple products are designed: It's the lack of features that's a feature, especially for the common (non-techie) crowd that wants a online device that's as simple to use as an appliance (like a toaster or a TV).
The whole "walled garden" aspect is irrelevant as long as the device does what most people want.
As for iOS fragmentation; there's only 3 iOS devices being shipped (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) with only a few variations between them.... A hell of a lot less fragmented then Android will ever be.
Re:At this rate (Score:3, Insightful)
People don't see iOS as limited since it does more things than any other mobile OS, and with less training and computer knowledge required. Other mobile systems do not even have native C apps, let alone the sheer number that Apple has. Not sure if you are including the Mac in your judgement, but since it has a full Unix and by far the best creative platform I don't see how it could be called limited in any way.
Re:At this rate (Score:5, Insightful)
This is MP3 wars all over again. Steady platform growth and incremental feature updates is what benefits Apple and leaves a trail of iKillers in its path.
While Android Tablet companies are trying to blow their wad on a single device that's spec'd out with last week's technology, Apple is more interested in investing into long-term platform development, rather than doing unnecessary weekly hardware refreshes. "Tegra 2. Flavor of the week!" Who cares? Not the majority of people.
The important takeaway from this is that it's a marathon, not a sprint. This is where Motorola, Toshiba, Samsung, et al are failing. They don't give a shit about "openness" or "Android." They want to ship a number of devices this quarter, forget about it and then ship some more next quarter. Especially when they're not making any money from updates or app sales. Any bugfixes, updates, recalls, or any type of customer interaction is cutting into their already razor-thin margins.
Apple has healthy margins so it's better for them to keep providing updates to old hardware. It's all about the platform.
Re:If you can't be better, at least be more expens (Score:4, Insightful)
Ever since the Samsung Galaxy Tab looked like priced way to high I have had a theory: They just fear to have their tablets to be looked upon as "cheap iPad clones". They think people have learned to think "expensive = good", so they price the things up through the roof.
Wait a minute, your theory is that Motorola (and Samsung) deliberately overpriced their tablets in order to get people to think they are better? And that's supposed to be their strategy for a mass market product?
Doesn't it simply make more sense that they can't build their tablets at a price competitive with Apple?