Motorola prices WiFi-only Xoom at £500 in the UK (update: €700 in Germany with 3G)
Finally Motorola gives us a chance to say something positive about its pricing of the 10.1-inch, Tegra 2-powered Xoom tablet. UK electronics retailer PC World has just put up its Xoom pre-order page, which will surprise many waking Brits with an extremely reasonable £450 ($730) asking price. That's £60 less than the direct competitor 32GB WiFi-only iPad -- the Xoom only has one storage option of 32GB and the model listed here comes without 3G -- and perhaps more importantly, is only £10 more than the 16GB version of Apple's tablet. It's common knowledge that to take on the iPad empire you'll have to at the very least match its price, and Moto is doing even better than that in the UK. There's only one worrying sign, we haven't been able to place a Xoom into our shopping basket yet, as the "Pre-order today" button seems to be malfunctioning, but we're guessing that's a temporary glitch that will be fixed without the price shooting up skywards.
Update: T-Mobile Germany has also revealed its Xoom pricing, this time for the 3G model: €699.95. Distribution will begin at the end of April and T-Mo will have a three-month exclusive on the tablet in its native land. The pricing positions the Xoom a mere 95 Euro cents above the 32GB-equipped iPad WiFi + 3G, meaning that your choice will truly come down to preference and not economics. See T-Mobile's full press release after the break.
Update 2: The PC World price and pre-order have been pulled. Gulp. Let's hope they comes back unchanged.
Update 3: The page is back, this time with an April 9th delivery date, but the price has Xoomed up to £500. Oh no.
[Thanks, John]
Show full PR text
Motorola Xoom™ with UMTS available for three months exclusively from Telekom
Feb 28, 2011
First tablet PC with Android 3.0 (Honeycomb)
Supports HPSA with up to 14.4 Mbit/s download capacity
Fast dual-core processor, two 5 and 2 megapixel cameras
From the end of April 2011 Telekom will be offering customers the first tablet PC with Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system: the Motorola Xoom. Android 3.0 is the first version of Android developed by Google specifically for mobile devices with large displays. Some of its key features are the home screen with 3D elements, large widgets with extended interaction options and newly designed notification icons. The Motorola Xoom's full-touch display featuring a 25.6 cm (10.1″) screen and a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels is the ideal platform for surfing on the go. "The Motorola Xoom fits perfectly with our strategy for the best mobile Internet experience," said Niek Jan van Damme, member of the Board of Management of Deutsche Telekom AG and Chairman of the Managing Board of Telekom Deutschland GmbH. "We are pleased to offer the tablet PC with UMTS exclusively for three months to our customers in Germany."
For all applications the Xoom's 1 GHz dual-core processor provides for its multitasking capability. HSPA technology for bandwidths of up to 14.4 Mbit/s enables high-speed mobile surfing and downloading even large files in a matter of seconds within the Telekom network. You can upload videos, photos and other content at up to 5.76 Mbit/s. A 5 megapixel camera with twin LED flash is integrated into the back of the Motorola Xoom. And that is not all: the tablet is equipped with a second 2 megapixel camera on the front. The Motorola Xoom supports HD video recording and playback and multimedia content can be streamed to your television via HDMI. Other features of the device, which is 247 x 167 x 12.4 mm in size and weighs just 700 grams, are a GPS module, a micro SD slot and a micro USB interface.
Telekom Deutschland plans to launch the Motorola Xoom at the end of April 2011 at a price of EUR 699.95. The version featuring UMTS mobile telecommunications technology for mobile data transmission will be available exclusively through Deutsche Telekom for 90 days.
