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Motorola's XOOM Tablet To Cost $799; Wi-Fi Requires 3G Activation?
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."
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.
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.
You forget about this: http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/11/01/19/2322215/Motorola-Sticks-To-Guns-On-Locking-Down-Android
The state you are in while your HEAD is detached... - wait, what?
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.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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
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.
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
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.
#DeleteChrome
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)
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
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.