Yesterday, I mentioned that Motorola lowered the price of Xoom to $499, a much more sane pricing given the low sales. According to Moconews, just 250K units were sold in the first month. Obviously, this is a welcoming move by the maker of the first Honeycomb device.
The question is why now? Did Motorola not realize that as superb as the hardware is, it was hampered by a beta-ish OS while it was trying to compete with the iPad 2? I think there are a few reasons why Motorola lowered the price at this time.
First, sales probably are not lighting things up back at Moto HQ. Second, there is talk that a newer Android tablet is making its way through the pipelines. Third, competition.
I think competition is probably the biggest reason for the price cut. Obviously, the iPad continues to dominate the market (for now) and I wonder just how Playbook going on sales affected Xoom's own sales
And now, the Xoom also has HP's Web OS based Touchpad to compete with. I'm not saying that the tablet market is like the iPod market where Apple owns 70% of the market with all the rest fight it out for the rest but so far, the tablet market is playing out that way. Sales of the iPad is probably closer to 80% of the market with just 20% left for everyone else in 2011.
By the way, does anyone know just how the Touchpad is doing in its first week on sale? There were short lines for both the Xoom and the Playbook but I have not heard a peep about any line for the Touchpad at all.
On the whole, the more competition we have in the market, the better it is for us mobile warriors.
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