Verizon Wireless has confirmed that it will start offering the 10.1 inch Motorola’s Xoom tablet Feb. 24 for $599.99 with a two-year service agreement, the carrier confirmed today. If you want to buy it without a contract, it will cost you $799.99.
There had been rumors running rampant for days that the Xoom was going to be sold for $800 with no contract, with many bloggers saying that amount would be so much people would be discouraged. They compared it to the 9.7-inch iPad and other gadgets which sell in the $500-$730 range. For example, an iPad with 32GB of storage and 3G service is priced at $729, while a similar Xoom runs users nearly $800.
Verizon put out that the wireless 3G data service for the Xoom will start at a cost of $20 a month for 1GB of data. No other details were available on other 3G prices. However, an upgrade to 4G LTE service is going to come out in the second quarter of the year and will not cost extra. The Xoom can also be purchased in a Wi-Fi ready version.
The Xoom was debuted during the Consumer Electronics Show in early January and was again shown to people at the Mobile World Congress last week in Barcelona, Spain.
When the first of the Xoom tablets ship they won’t support Adobe Flash. However, Adobe has said that users will be able to get an over-the-air update to Flash Player 10.2 within a few weeks of the Xoom being available.
Having support for Flash is considered to be one of the advantages that Android based devices have over Apple devices, which don’t have Flash.
The Xoom will however, ship with a dual coreNvidia Tegra 2 processor and each core will be running at 1 GHz for a total of 2 GHz of power.
The Xoom will also have two digital cameras, a front-facing 2.0 megapixel model that works as a webcam for video chat, and a 5.0-megapixel camera on the rear for taking still images and 720p video. The Xoom has 1280-by-800 resolution, while the iPad has 1024-by-768. It is a little thinner than the iPad, and both of them weigh 730 grams.
The Xoom supports Google services, and Verizon made a point of announcing on its Internet site that Google Maps shown with the Xoom will load fast and that the 3D vector maps can be tilted, rotated and enlarged.
