Tablet Market Up for Grabs, Google’s Eye on the Prize
Following the Monday announcement on XOOM being released on the European market, Motorola gave out today the names of the retailers that will be selling the new tablet. The Carphone Warehouse, Best Buy, Dixons Retail Plc and Deutsche Telekom will add on their offer list the new tablet running on Honeycomb:
‘Motorola XOOM is the first tablet to offer Android 3.0, which has been specifically developed for tablets and brings a whole new computing experience. We are sure the XOOM will delight our customers – enabling them to enjoy benefits such as Internet, gaming, keeping in touch via email and video chat, and the ability to download all the apps that Android tablets provide,” said Fennell, category director at Dixons Retail.’
Android was the star of the Mobile World Congress event as most tablets presented were running either on Android 2.2 (Froyo), Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) or Android 3.0 (Honeycomb). HTC revealed its Flyer tablet, a 7-inch display device running, as expected on Gingerbread. Samsung as well revealed its Galaxy Tab 10.1 at tight competition with LG’s Optimus Pad, a 8.9-incher committed to the Android OS. Acer as well was lurked by the magic of the Android OS and revealed its Iconia Tab A500.
Striking another note, HP introduced its 9.7-inch TouchPad running on webOS 3.0 with no rear camera, unlike its predecessors and RIM offered a practical insight on Blackberry Playbook.
Going back to Motorola Xoom, mobility chief Sanjay Jha confirmed that the price of the tablet on the US market would be of $800, more expensive than its Apple counterpart.
“We felt that our ability to deliver 50Mb/s would justify the $799 price point. It is 32GB with 3G and a free upgrade to 4G. Being competitive with iPad is important. We feel that from the hardware and capabilities we deliver we are at least competitive and in a number of ways better [than the iPad].”
The competition is tighter than ever in the mobile industry given that the other days Microsoft and Nokia announced their partnership and creativity is the answer for competitors to win the game.
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