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Best Buy Ad Reveals Motorola Xoom’s Unfortunate Price Tag

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The Motorola Xoom may be priced on the high side with an $800 price tag for launch on February 24th according to an advertisement from Best Buy. The Android 3.0 Honeycomb capacitive touchscreen tablet will initially launch with Verizon Wireless’s 3G CDMA/EV-DO support and will have the radio be upgradeable to 4G at a later date. At $800, the price point may be comparable to the highest end iPad model–the iPad 3G at 16 GB retails for $629, 32 GB for $729, and 64 GB for $829. Given Motorola’s and Verizon’s pricing on the Xoom, it seems that the two are betting that Android 3.0’s user experience will be competitive with the iPad’s as the duo are not competing on price with their first Android 3.0 slate to hit the market.

Additionally, it seems that the WiFi radio, or the tablet’s activation process itself, may be locked down. To free WiFi, users will need to subscribe to at least 1 month of 3G mobile broadband data. It’s unclear how this works, but Verizon Wireless’s handsets–smartphones–in the past are usually set up to go through an activation process at first start up. The Xoom may be subjected to the same activation process and the firmware may not allow users to proceed without first activating it on the carrier’s mobile broadband network, forcing users to pay for at least 1 month of 3G data. The move, then, would force consumers to pay for at least the $800 tablet price plus a minimum of 1 GB of mobile broadband 3G data for another $20 for the first month, bringing the out of pocket expense of the Xoom to $820, closer in line with Apple’s iPad 3G with 64 GB of internal storage pricing of $829.

Via: Engadget

6 Comments

6 Comments

  1. Suriya

    02/07/2011 at 8:32 am

    You are missing the Activation fee charged by the Verizon.

  2. AmicusC

    02/07/2011 at 9:05 am

    Just say NO!

  3. GoodThings2Life

    02/07/2011 at 12:05 pm

    Curious that it seems to meet or exceed the iPad on every other spec except storage being at 32GB instead of 64GB, so what’s the real problem here? Let’s talk about activation fees and data plan fees for both and realize that once you add the same fees to the iPad it gets similar bumps in cost. I won’t even mention that the iPad on AT&T has data caps and that the data plans typically cost more over the life of the contract.

    I’m not saying Xoom’s priced right (a device like that should be about $600 on the high end), I’m just saying you can’t compare the two by talking about one being priced higher because of activation and service fees and not mention the fact that the other has the same type of charges.

  4. C.Nieves

    02/07/2011 at 1:20 pm

    The price tag is unfortunate. I was waiting on this before purchasing a tablet. Not worth the price… Shame on you Motorola. Good luck with that.

  5. Anonymous

    02/07/2011 at 7:39 pm

    They blew it with that price. That’s active digitizer Tablet PC money right there.

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