The Motorola android tablets are taking a hit in sales numbers. The Xoom was supposed to be a challenge to the Apple iPad, but turned out to sell only 440,000 units.
The Motorola news is depressing. They have shipped 11 million mobile devices over the last three months. By comparison, Apple shipped 9.25 iPads alone, not counting any other iProduct. That is less than two million units of the full total of all products sold by Motorola. It is safe to say that the Motorola Xoom was a failure.
But it is not just the Motorola Xoom that took a fall. A new smartphone that this company put out is having some screen and camera problems. Motorola named it with a view to the future. It is called the “Triumph” and has a large 4.1 display. Unfortunately, that display has a problem with flickering. The camera also is refusing to perform autofocus. Those Motorola Triumph owners that can get their cameras to focus report a related problem. The photos seem to have a yellow or green tint to them.
Other bad news for Motorola is that there are various other tablets out there that also run android. The Xoom is running an updated android version called Honeycomb, which is better than what many of their competitors are running. But the sheer numbers of other cheaper android tablets are attractive. The original price was a true impediment to sales. The Xoom 32 gigabyte tablet came out of the gate with an $800 dollar price tag. Why was it so high? Because a user can upgrade it to 4G networks. By comparison, an iPad starts out at $500 dollars, meaning you can get an iPad and a smartphone too, for the price of one Motorola Xoom.
Upgrading to 4G may be fine for Xoom tablet buyers, but its nearest competitor, the T-Mobile G-Slate, costs just $530 dollars. The ASUS Transformer, being sold at Best Buy, is only $400 dollars and has the same Honeycomb mobile operating system as the Xoom.
What does Motorola have planned to offset the weak sales of their star tablet? It has always been to manufacture more smartphones. The Triumph is going to be followed by the Droid Bionic, a 4.3 inch, dual core, 4G enabled smartphone. It is being delayed but is headed for the Verizon “Big Red” network and will use their LTE network. It will hopefully bring Motorola out of their sales slump.
July 31, 2011 at 2:44 am
As an early Xoom adopter, I couldn’t be happier. It is the swiss army knife of gadgets. Side by side it smokes the iPad2. Motorola has surprised a lot of folks by being the early leader in Android tablets and is well positioned to build unit sales with the two upcoming 4G LTE tablets that were recently announced.