There’s been a lot of cool stuff shown off at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Spain, over the last couple of days. At this year’s event we’ve seen dual-core smart phones, 3D displays and caught peeks at the newest iterations of some promising mobile operating systems.
This MWC was also supposed to be the coming out party for tablets powered by Google Inc.’s Android operating sytstem tablet-centric revision, Honeycomb. And while we’ve seen a couple of them – the already-outed Motorola Inc. Xoom, the shiny new LG Electronics Co. Ltd. Optimus Pad and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.’s Galaxy Tab 10.1, their existence has been overshadowed by persistent rumours surrounding their pricing.
While it had been assumed (and even leaked) that the Xoom would come in at about $800 – around the same price as an equivalent Apple Inc. iPad, a recent leak from Best Buy put the price of the slate at $1,199 – more than double that of the entry-level iPad.
Although many assumed this listing was a placeholder (it disappeared shortly after it hit the blogs), another pricing point, this time for the LG Optimus Pad – and coming from LG themselves has priced their device at a cool $1,345.
There hasn’t been any pricing details on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 yet, however it’s worth remembering that it’s younger brother launched at around $600, so we’d expect it to run you a little more than that.
While of course these prices aren’t final at this point, if they prove accurate it could spell disaster for Google’s tablet efforts. Honeycomb has been a long time in the making, and many are pinning their hopes on it to offer a competitive alternative to Apple’s iPad in the tablet races. Android recently overtook iOS in smart phone sales, but if a more reasonable price-point can’t be reached then it may be a while before the little green robot can compete on larger devices.
This pricing could, of course, point to something more sinister entirely. It’s worth remembering that all these new tablets are 3G (or in some cases 4G) devices. Perhaps this pricing is a dirty move on the part of carriers and manufacturers to ensure the devices are bought with a monthly contract in tow. A $1,000 dollar off-contract price is completely unreasonable, however if that price then drops to $400 when you sign up to an 18-month data plan, it suddenly doesn’t seem like such a bad deal.
