Posted on 02/13/2011 9:58:34 PM PST by Swordmaker
Best Buy has begun promoting Motorola’s Xoom tablet. Pre-orders begin on Thursday at Best Buy stores (or so they delusionally dream).
Price: $1,199.99. 1 month data activation with Verizon Wireless required.
Best Buy’s Motorola Xoom page is here.
MacDailyNews Take: No wonder Motorola named it “exhume,” it’s already dead.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Dan K." for the heads up.]
The Apple 32GB iPad is only $729. What are they thinking?
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
I have an Android phone and IPad, and am a fan of both platforms. That said, i am struggling to see why anyone would go with this or any other Android tablet over an iPad.
Best Buy removes the page:
I suspect that the leaked $799 price tag will be what the price will be for an unsubsidized pad when the pre-orders go live, with the subsidized price a considerable amount lower.
The tidbit I'm more interested in was the part that required one month of Verizon 3g service before being able to use it wifi only. Again, could just be part of the placeholder page, but extracting another $20 from consumers just to buy an unsubsidized pad is... a pretty shocking practice, if that does actually turn out to be the case.
See post 4.
Why have a “place holder” that damages your product? Every major tech source has reported this already.
We’re very happy with our Straigh Talk phones at $30 month for 1,000 minutes or $45 for unlimited talk, text & Internet. $1,200?! Want to read a book? Get Kindle. Ridiculous!!
I am not too sure you are right... 7" tablets have unsubsidized prices of around $700... this is a ~10" tablet with faster and better processor (read more expensive), more than 110% more screen acreage than the 7" tablets (read even more expensive).
Some reporters from another news site who went to the BestBuy page before it was pulled clicked on the links and found themselves on the BestBuy pre-order page... pricing there was ALSO $1,199. That is not a placeholder pricing if that is true.
Still curious about the reported requirement of one month of Verizon 3g service before being able to use it wifi only.
Yep, there's the 1 month requirement of service from Verizon in the text under the picture. Bizarre requirement.
The iPad, and yes the Android tablets, do far more than merely read books. Other than that, your Straight Talk phones look like a good deal for a mere phone. In fact, thank you for bringing this company to my attention right now. A friend may need a cheap way to communicate.
Somebody in marketing REALLY messed up. It should have been embedded in the price with “one month free subscription to Verizon included”.
I got my Google Nexus One phone for free at a Linux Convention. It was an unlocked phone so I slid in my SIM card, called t-mobile to try out 3g and I have left it on since for $30/mo. t-mobile did not require a contract for existing phone customers. I could have gone month to month. If I had had to have a contract I may never have turned it on. Once you try a 3g enabled device it is hard to give it up.
They’re not a mere phone, really. My wife’s is a “semi” smart phone and I can browse with mine. They have voice, texting, a camera, etc. Mine was about $80 and hers was $120, IIRC. Their regular phones start at free.
I have an Android phone, an iTouch, and have played around with some friend’s iPad’s. That said, I can’t really see much of a difference (practically, for the average consumer) between them. If the prices are the same, Apple is a better choice than most others mainly because of the nice aluminum body, and the extra time they’ve had to work out bugs.
For those who are more technologically oriented, and like having the higher levels of control over more basic functions of their devices, Android is the way to go, hands down.
Straight Talk has only two "smartphones" and they are failed Nokia phones... the ones that have Nokia's President announcing last week that their company is standing on a burning platform, the Symbian platform. Nokia has just announced they are abandoning it and partnering with Microsoft.
Any browsing you can do is crippled and limited to mostly mobile websites. They do not offer any Android phones at this time. According to the critiques of their service I read, even their service is limited and browsing and email has to be done through Straight Talk servers, apps for their Nokia "smartphones" cannot even be purchased from the Nokia Ovi app store, but rather through the much more limited Straight Phone app store. These are serious limitations on their smartphones.
I looked at the phones. They offer 26 phones (at least in my area in California). YMMV. The FREE phones are reconditioned older (four year out of date) model flip phones, which is all well and good... for what they offer, they will do the job. And the other phones Straight Talk sells are at least two year old surplus or remainder models from other manufacturers.
For example, Straight Talks NEW top of the line smartphones, both announced mid December 2010 to replace their older "smartphones" that had numerous complaints lodged against them, are the Nokia E71 and the Nokia 6790... but the E71 was released March 17, 2009 and the Nokia 6790 was originally released as a captive phone, the Surge, on AT&T in July 2009.
Straight Talk Phones are not, and probably never will be, cutting edge. They keep their prices down by selling older technology. So what? They are what they are. They offer value for value at a cut rate. They do not and will not appeal to people looking for cutting edge phones.
They have to be sub-contracting with some other carrier for their signals. Who? They don't say. But it has to be AT&T, since their phones are GSM phones and they have to be using the AT&T frequencies since from the phones I saw, the ones I recognized I had seen all of them with AT&T logos at one time or another.
By-the-way, a "semi" smart phone, what your wife has, is what is known as a "feature" phone.
Most people really don’t need “bleeding edge” technology or even leading edge. Heck, there are even companies with cell phones that merely call other people and do nothing else. My wife just gave me her old phone (a Samsung R451C) when she bought the feature phone. I use it to call people. PERIOD. Even though it’s capable of more.
And if you refuse to use iTunes, you have to use something other than an iPad as well.
That's my reasons for avoiding Apple.
I have read about the one month 3g requirement to enable WiFi use as well. That’s a major scam IMHO. Sounds like a Verizon thing to me, and I wouldn’t put it past them.
When I spilled tea on my iPhone 3G, I swapped my SIM card into my brother’s old Razr for a couple of days. I was impressed with how well it does what it does. I was even able to use iSync to load my contacts and calendars onto it. Excellent build quality and sound, a crisp and responsive interface, all in a nice little package.
There is certainly a place and a market for “feature” phones. I don’t think there’s much of a market for featureless phones any more; it’s easy enough to ignore the features you don’t need, and you can’t get much cheaper than free. There is a niche market for just-a-phones like the Jitterbug, but
Me, I’m hooked on smartphones, after 2.5 years with an iPhone and three years with a Treo before that. There are fewer and fewer tasks that tie me to my desk.
Seems a little pricey, btw. :’) My last cell phone cost $30.
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