Motorola Xoom slated for SA launch in April
Motorola Xoom, an Android tablet computer in competition with Apple’s iPad, is set to be launched in South Africa during April 2011, a Motorola spokesperson said today.
The device was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January 2011 where it was crowned best gadget of the show.
It runs Android 3.0 Honeycomb on an Nvidia Tegra 2 1Ghz dual-core processor and has 1GB DDR2 RAM and 32GB on-board storage.
Honeycomb is the first version of Google’s mobile operating system (OS) designed with tablets in mind, and the Xoom was the first tablet launched that runs the new operating system.
Motorola’s answer to the iPad also features a 5 mega-pixel (MP) rear-facing camera capable of recording 720p video, a 2MP forward-facing camera, and HDMI output.
The Motorola Xoom went on sale in the United States in February 2011 at US$800 for the model that runs on mobile networks and US$600 for the Wi-Fi only model.
This compared favourably against the original iPad, whose 32GB Wi-Fi only version also retailed for US$599. The Xoom capable of connecting to Verizon’s mobile network sold for just less than the top-of-the-range 64GB iPad which was priced at US$829.
Last week, just a few days after the announcement of the iPad 2, it is reported that a US retailer dropped the price of the Wi-Fi only Motorola Xoom to US$539.
No pricing for South Africa is available just yet, but the spokesperson for Motorola said that they’re planning on launching the device across all cellular networks at competitive prices.
The Motorola Xoom also has two docks, one normal charging dock and one charging dock with speakers, as well as a portfolio case as accessories.
According the Motorola spokesperson it isn’t confirmed whether the accessories would be brought to SA or what they would cost.
As South Africa usually forms part of the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region, prices in countries such as the UK are often indicative of what to expect locally.
Carphone Warhouse in the UK have the Motorola Xoom on sale in-line with iPad pricing and one would expect that for the Xoom to be competitive in South Africa it would have to compete with Apple’s popular tablet price-wise as well.
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