UPDATED 11:04 EST / MARCH 16 2011

Tablet Market Sighs Relief with Motorola Xoom Price Drop

Penetrating throughout the Asian and European market, the WiFi-only Motorola XOOM will be available in the US as well starting March 27. Purchases are available in physical and online retailers including Amazon.com, Best Buy, Costco, RadioShack, Sam’s Club (select locations), Staples and Walmart . You can also buy them at commercial IT channels, regional retailers and carriers as inked in an agreement with Synnex Corporation Brightpoint, Inc. Boasting a 10.1-inch widescreen, 32 GB memory, and Android’s tablet-exclusive operating system, Honeycomb 3.0, the new edition of the Motorola Xoom is priced more comfortably at $599.

“Motorola Xom is a truly innovative tablet – its design, coupled with being the first tablet to have Android 3.0, results in a user experience that is one-of-a-kind,” said Dan Papalia, vice president of retail sales for Motorola Mobility. “We are now continuing to expand the choices available to consumers with the MOTOROLA XOOM Wi-Fi to be available soon from numerous leading retailers in the United States.”

Aside from a rich display, the Xoom also features the following: a 1GHz dual-core processor and 1 GB of RAM, enabling the unit to multi-task at high performance.  It also packs in Google Maps 5.0 with 3D interaction; access to over 3 million Google eBooks and apps from Android Market; and support Beta Adobe Flash Player 10.2, which are all features Motorola touts as being truly competitive with Apple’s tablet package. With Honeycomb as its native operating system and the first device to ever use it, the Xoom benefits from Honeycomb’s offerings such as widgets, multi-tasking browsing, customization and notification, which are perks you won’t find on the iPad.

The Xoom is getting a lot of attention from Motorola’s developer support program MOTODEV as an initial release of its kind. It is expected that the program will continue to develop Honeycomb-centric applications. In fact, as part of its commitment to Android, as the two companies launched global developer events across 11 cities in North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia. The first event was held earlier this month in San Francisco, and was attended by 665 developers and Motorola’s team of Android experts.

Facing a tough tablet market is only one concern for the handset manufacturer, as the company is undergoing a big split.  Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. and Motorola Solutions Inc. used to be one company under Motorola Inc., but were pressured to split from each other this year because of investor Carl Icahn. Icahn believed that the mobile phone division is undervalued, thus, it is losing the market to Apple and RIM. It is true though that Xoom tablet is not doing very well right now, in light of the recent iPad 2 launch. Its shares went down by over 4% today, and 35% since mid-January. With iPad holding 73% of the market, Motorola Xoom and Samsung Galaxy tab will have to curb their prices as well.


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