Motorola's CEO Sanjay Jha said on Monday that their latest entry into the tablet market, the Xoom, is "off to a good start." Speaking at San Francisco's Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, the executive confirmed that the recently released tablet has been enjoying respectable sales figures, reports the WSJ. Jha also mentioned Motorola's expectations of how the Verizon iPhone would affect Droid sales, matching closely to the actual outcome. "We were comforted by the fact that things weren't worse than we had guided," Jha said.
Introduced at CES 2011, the Xoom was released just last week and marks the debut of Android 3.0 Honeycomb on a shipping tablet. Despite promised Adobe Flash support, its availability has been held back until this spring, when it will be available from the Android Marketplace. Support for its microSD slot has also been held back until a software update enables it, but these setbacks appear to have been mostly ignored by buyers. Reviews for the device have also been positive, pointing to the high performance and installed Honeycomb OS as particular strong points.
The Xoom's biggest rival, the iPad, costs $100 less in its most basic configuration, but is beaten out by the Xoom with its camera and 4x the amount of RAM. With the rumoured debut of an iPad 2 on Wednesday, however, this feature gap could soon be closing off. One key selling point, as noted by Motorola in their Super Bowl advertisement, is that the Xoom isn't another Apple product. Beyond features like Honeycomb and a front-facing camera, that could prove to be its biggest strength.
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