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Amazon, Best Buy, Costco, RadioShack, Sam’s Club, Staples, and Walmart are all expected to have the Motorola Xoom Wi-Fi edition available for sale on March 27 for $599. That’s the official announcement made by Motorola today regarding availability of its new tablet in Wi-Fi-only form across the U.S.
We had previously heard rumors that the Wi-Fi version of the Android tablet was expected to appear at Sam’s Club for $539. While the location was right, the price was off by some $60. However, with so many retailers competing for sales whose to say we won’t see some discounted pricing before the end of April?
With the price matching that of the iPad 2 32GB, the Xoom will be a tempting proposition for those who’d prefer to be running an Android 3.0 OS and the freedoms that brings with it. It combines 32GB of on-board storage with 1GB RAM, a 1GHz dual-core processor, an all-day battery (10 hours+), support for Flash Player 10.2, and a display that’s still usable in direct sunlight according to our own tests.
Russell spent some time with the Xoom and recounted his first 72 hours. The experience was generally very positive even if it did feel a little unfinished as a tablet.
Motorola also has its eye on the corporate market and has done a distribution deal with Synnex Corp. and Brightpoint Inc. to get this into the IT sector. That’s potentially going to push up sales significantly beyond what competing against the iPad 2 in the consumer market alone could ever achieve.
While a $600 Xoom is a welcome edition to the Android tablet line-up, we have to question Motorola’s decision not to launch it at the same time as the $800 version. Unless some decent marketing campaign is going to run, a lot of people will continue to associate the Xoom name with a very expensive tablet that appeared a few weeks ago.
