As more information is released about the upcoming Motorola Xoom, like hands-on pictures from Devin Coldewey’s article today at TechCrunch, the question of when a real competitor for the iPad emerges. While the iPad has the big edge in the tablet market, there are many devices entering the market in the near future that could eat into iPad’s traffic share.
The Motorola Xoom is generating a lot of buzz as its release date of February 24th approaches. Among them is that it will be the first tablet to run the tablet-specific Operating System, Android 3.0 (Honeycomb), and a “minimum price” of $799 according to PCWorld. Given the $499 price tag on iPad, this may prove an ambitious price for the Xoom, given Apple’s solid standing as the tech product company for the luxury-item seekers.
However, could all the attention for the Xoom be good for sales? Looking at a sample of traffic from Chitika’s advertising network for Android devices in the USA and Canada, one can see that there’s a clear opportunity for an Android device to make a breakthrough in the tablet market.
The Streak and Galaxy are the “beneficiaries” of the earlier release date, with the Xoom still over a week away from release. Still, none even exceed a third of 1% of the Android market, showing how far Android tablets have to go.
However, will the mystery of Honeycomb, and the potential luxury-item market gained by the higher price help the Xoom perform better than the Galaxy did? Chitika Insights will be sure to look into the matter once Xoom has its full release.
Xoom is jumping the gun on this. The microSD doesn’t work yet, you can’t charge via USB and half the “accessories” aren’t even available yet. Add on the possible $1,200 price tag and I think iPad is safe where it’s at.
I suppose really the Xoom is but the first major tablet using Android optimised for tablets and so even a market share of a few percent will be good, especially considering the rumoured price.