Inauspicious Start For Motorola Xoom
By Ben Rooney
- Getty Images
- CEO of Motorola Mobility Sanjay Jha with the Xoom tablet earlier this year
Let’s be generous. The Motorola Xoom is pacing itself. It isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step and so on.
It appears that the Xoom hasn’t had the best of launches if an analyst at Deutsche Bank, and picked up by the usually reliable Silicon Alley Insider.
According to an estimate from Deutsche Bank, Motorola has only sold 100,000 Xooms thus far. Deutsche Bank got its estimate after looking at the Android developer website to see how many people were using Honeycomb.
Numbers geek Charles Arthur at The Guardian has done a fine job in taking the numbers apart.
Could the number be higher? Very easily: if a new Xoom owner looks in the Market and sees no apps of interest, they won’t go back. And there’s not many 3.0 apps. New Android phone owners, on the other hand, have a very large number of apps to choose from: they’d be more likely to make return visits. So the number of Xoom accesses could be artificially deflated.
The obvious comparison will be made with the iPad. In comparison to Apple’s figures the Xoom does look pretty anemic. Apple sold 300,000 on the first weekend it was available. The only other tablet to generate some real traction has been Samsung’s Tab. The South Korean company said it had shipped 2 million. Shipping and selling are two very different things. It hasn’t revealed its sales.
If the figures are good—and they have been widely reported (which, of course doesn’t prove anything)—then it is not the best of starts for the 4G tablet. At the recent Mobile World Congress journalists had the opportunity to interview CEO of Motorola Mobility Sanjay Jhaabout the pricing strategy. At $799, the Xoom is more expensive than all but one iPad model. It costs $70 more than a comparable 32 GB iPad with 3G.
Mr. Jha was happy that they had it right. Expect to see some heavy discounting soon.
Meanwhile Apple Insider is reporting happy times.
A “conservative estimate” of iPad 2 supply going forward sees Apple taking delivery of 4 million to 4.5 million iPad units a month, totaling more than 12 million units in the second quarter of 2011, supply chain sources told DigiTimes. Upstream touch panel makers reportedly indicated that sales of the iPad 2 are running at a faster rate than the first-generation device released in April of 2010.
Business Insider: Motorola Xoom A Flop, Just 100,000 Sold So Far
No comments:
Post a Comment