Honeycomb makes Motorola Xoom special but not special enough

Motorola Xoom is not yet ready to supersede iPad 2. After its launch on February 24, Deutsche Bank released a sales estimate of 100,000 units of Motorola Xoom compared to a huge number of 300,000 units of iPad2 sold on day one. The number is growing exponentially for iPad2.

Even though statistics prove that Xoom did not supersede iPad 2, it is definitely acting as a counter-agent. It is the only tablet with Google’s latest version of Android- Honeycomb, which is yet to be made available as open-source. Xoom boasts a larger screen than the iPad 2.

Android 3.0, Honeycomb, was designed from the ground up for devices with larger screen sizes and improves on Android favorites such as widgets, multi-tasking, browsing, notifications and customization, says Google. But Honeycomb has made a lot of advancements over its previous versions besides making the use of Android sets more user-friendly.

Xoom can endorse its expectation of matching with ipad2 until other players come up with honeycomb which is not far away in the future. Honeycomb won’t give a competitive edge to Xoom for a long time.
A high entry level price for Xoom is another impediment to Xoom's success.

When iPad was launched at $499 for 16GB, Wi-Fi-only tablet, Xoom was priced at $799.99 at the entry level. It was a Wi-Fi, 3G tablet without any contract. The one with contract of two years data plan with Verizon was priced at $599.99. Xoom started selling at $599.99 for Wi-Fi only tablets only after March 27.

But again price is not the only reason for the success of the iPad2. When it comes to any Apple product, price was not the only concern for buyers. It is the product itself that does the marketing. Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, has employed the most phenomenal marketing brains known so far. to achieve the market edge.

Though their competitor is unreachable, Motorola is not ready to give up the fight. While we believe Street expectations may be a bit higher, 100k units after only two months on the market is a decent start, Deutsche Bank note says.