There’s good news and less good news on the Motorola XOOM tablet front. The good news is that despite early reports suggesting that the tablet would run $799, Reuters is reporting that a WiFi-only version of the tablet will be available for about $600.

The less good news is that the $799price tag is real. That’s how much the tablet will run with a 3G modem onboard — although that’s the unsubsidized Verizon Wireless price. It’s possible the carrier could offer a lower price to customers that sign up for a long term service contract.

It’s worth noting that the leaked Best Buy ad which has been making the rounds shows a $799 price tag for a 3G capable version of the tablet — and also suggests that you’ll need to activate the tablet by paying for a month of Verizon service before you can use the tablet over WiFi. Presumably there will be no such requirement when the WiFi-only version of the tablet is released.

Motorola confirmed this week that the WiFi model is slated to hit Europe in the second quarter of 2011. There’s still no word on when we can expect that model to hit the US.

The Motorola XOOM is expected to be the first tablet to ship with Google Android 3.0 Honeycomb. It has a 10.1 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel display, a 1 GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual core processor, front and rear cameras, 1GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage.

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8 replies on “WiFi-only Motorola XOOM to run about $600”

  1. The problem is that tablets are trying to compete with the iPad. When consumers look at the iPad and any comparable Android tablet, if the price point is similar, they’re going to go for the iPad.

    I think pricing these units so high is a poor decision.

    1. No, pricing it “high” is a sound business decision.

      When consumers evaluate a product, s/he will eval the product against the “reference price” (RP). While the iPad has indeed established the RP for tablets, it is different enough that competing products can to some degree set their own RP.

      Users typically use the MSRP as the RP. Therefore, if a tab has a published $800 price, and later sells for $700, it will be more of a “bargain,” thereby getting more buyers. Thus, as the vendor, you want to set a high RP, to make your product more attractive when it sells for some lower price.

      Evaluating a product’s worth is mostly a psychological (and emotional) process. It is almost never a rational decision. The above, and other sales tactics, are based on that fact.

  2. The “published” price point is irrelevant. There’ll be plenty of tablets with the same specs, and commoditization will set in quickly, i.e. price will the be main buy criterion. These prices will be deeply discounted in short order.

  3. Y’all know Talk Is Cheap…Everybody and their brother is bringing out a tablet, hell even I might bring one out sometime…but how many can you walk into a store and buy…to my knowledge only 1 and why anybody would want it is beyond me. It will probably stop working when that dictator finally dies.

  4. Best to have “chit for brains” to pay that much for an android tablet…by the time summer is here with the avalanche of models the sweet spot price is going to have to be $300 to $400 max!

    1. Actually 600 bucks isn’t bad if they don’t lock the bootloader or do anything else underhanded (I have no idea why they would do that for a wifi version anyways). The hardware is fantastic… much better than anything on the market now

  5. Tablets coming out of our ears! I have the iPad for now, but am waiting to see how some of the reviews on these other models pan out before I upgrade.

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