Carphone Warehouse prices up 3G Xoom Carphone Warehouse has finally revealed what it plans to charge for Motorola's Xoom, the flagship Android 3.0 Honeycomb tablet. It will want 600 quid for the 10in, HSPA 3G-enabled fondleslab. That's £100 more than Dixons' PC World and Currys stores will be asking for the Wi-Fi only Xoom. However, CW will bundle a £34 charging …
I don't normally leap to defend some Dixons product but the Advent Vega is Tegra 2 dual core 10" tablet that sells for £250. While the Vega supposedly has a pretty crappy Android 2.2 and would benefit from 3.0, it hits most of the points on the hardware side. THAT's the price that tablets should selling for.
Charging £600 for a tablet is taking the piss. They don't need to cost that much at all. I sense that the Android 3.0 has caused some manufacturers to lose their minds with regard to how much they can gouge people.
Tab has reduced a lot in price though in reality it should never have been so expensive in the first place. Regardless of whether the high end models become cheaper, there will certainly be more affordable tablets.
The Vega & Archos 101 demonstrate it's perfectly possible to have a pretty decent quality tablet for less than £300. What these tablets lack is not the hardware but the proper tablet software. I expect their successors to enjoy a lot better user experience and I expect they won't be alone in the market either.
That's more than I paid for my HP TM2 tablet, and that has 2GB RAM, 320GB HDD, 12" screen with touch AND digitizer, keyboard, lots of USB, external DVD drive, HDMI port, 2 graphics cards (one intel for power saving, one ATi for gaming) and it can play Fallout 3 and runs Windows 7.
I mean....£600....for Android? Feck.
The price has been on their website for quite a while now and it's only just being reported here now? The price is stupidly high, even £500 for a WiFi only version is too high. Given Motorola's attitude to older products like the Milestone (STILL no Android 2.2 update...) I am 99% likely to say "fuq ov" to them and their Xoom. When any company releases a product that makes Apple the cheaper option you know they've lost the plot.
No reason for Motorola to not match iPad2 prices to start with because only a mug would buy an Android tablet now - in six months time there will be competition from HTC, LG, Acer and Asus to name but four so the price is bound to drop. All Motorola is doing is fleecing early adopters but that's the name of the game.
I'm not shocked by this; consider the price of the Jobsian wonder-brick.
Moto would be nuts to subsidise, CW need to make a profit and all the sheep out there will be fast to part with beans too.
Give it 6 months and the prices will be much more sensible.
Paris because she's happily stroke a sleek, hard ...etc....
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