Motorola Xoom’s $799 price justified because you get “4G for

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The full list of specs for Motorola’s upcoming Honeycomb Xoom tablets have now been released, and alongside them, a defiant defense of the Xoom’s $799 price courtesy of CEO Sanjay Jha.
According to Jha, the Xoom will be a great value and worth every penny of its $799 3G price. Why? Jha wants to pretend 3G is the same as 4G.
Jha says that Motorola felt that “our our ability to deliver 50Mb/s would justify the $799 price point. It is 32GB with 3G and a free upgrade to 4G.” What he’s referring to here is the 3G Xoom’s ability to suck down up to 50Mb/s in wireless broadband.
The Xoom boasts a fast modem to be sure… but this is a semantic lie. The Xoom is not a 4G device, and it is not capable of the same speeds as an LTE tablet would be. Rather, it’s capable of HSPA+ speed, which are fast, sure, but not 4G fast… and certainly not so impressive that they warrant a $799 price.
Weirdly, Jha then goes on to argue that the $799 price for the 3G version and the $600 price for the WiFi version are competitive with the iPad.
“Being competitive with iPad is important,” he said. “We feel that from the hardware and capabilities we deliver we are at least competitive and in a number of ways better…. [For the WiFi-Only version], the price is set by iPad at $599 and we will be right around there.”
Uh. The cheapest iPad is $499, not $599. The Xoom looks cool, Motorola, but you’re really stretching the truth pretty thin trying to justify its price, don’t you think?
 
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