Verizon Wireless to Offer Xoom for $600 with 2-Year Contract

From The Online Reporter    

- Best Buy Offers It for $800, No Contract

Verizon Wireless will subsidize Motorola Mobility’s Xoom tablet by $200 and sell it for $600 with a two-year contract. It sells the iPad with a 32GB version bundled with its MiFi product for $730 without a contract.

Best Buy said it will sell the Xoom for $800 with no contract.

Verizon Wireless’ charges for the data plan are 1GB of data for $20 per month; 3GB for $35; 5GB for $50 and 10GB for $80. 

Verizon Wireless sells Samsung’s Galaxy Tab for $499 without a contract. 

AT&T Mobility sells the 32GB version of the iPad for $729 without a contract.

It’s estimated that about 90% of all iPads are the Wi-Fi-only version.

Motorola has promised a Wi-Fi-only version of the Xoom that is “meaningfully cheaper,” about the same as the Wi-Fi-only iPad, which sells for $599.

Motorola has said it’ll offer an LTE model but Verizon Wireless has not announced the LTE rates for the Xoom.

Verizon says its LTE network has an average real-world downlink performance of 5 to 12Mbps. Motorola will upgrade the Xoom to LTE sometime in the second quarter of 2011 at no charge to existing customers.

The Xoom appears to be the best of the Android tablets released so far because it uses the tablet-optimized version of Android called Honeycomb, has a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor and a 10.1-inch HD display that supports 1080p. It also has HDMI to display content on TV sets. It has two cameras, a front-facing, 2-megapixel camera for video chats over Wi-Fi, EVDO or LTE and a rear-facing 5-megapixel camera that captures video in 720p HD.

Verizon is very important to Motorola Mobility, which said in its recent SEC filings that it received 28% of its total 2010 revenue, or $3.22 billion, from Verizon Communications, which includes Verizon Wireless. For 2009 and 2010 it was 17% and 13% of its revenue, respectively. Motorola also makes set-top boxes. 

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