Hello Moto
Motorola seems to have chosen two main retailers to launch its Xoom tablet into the UK, and given them respective exclusivity on the Wi-Fi and 3G models.
The Dixons retail group has got the Wi-Fi-only model, as implied by the apparently inadvertent leak last week. The Xoom will cost you £500 from any of the Dixons channels, sadly not the £450 implied by the leak. We've also heard talk of a cash-back deal, but can see no evidence of that this morning. Dixons.co.uk says it will start shipping on 9 April.
Initial exclusivity on the 3G version seems to have gone to Carphone Warehouse/Best Buy. CPW is offering the Xoom 3G for preorder at £600, with a £35 charging dock thrown in. For some reason CPW hasn't got it together to come up with data tariffs for the Xoom yet.
The good news is that we're not getting too shafted on the exchange rate for once. The 3G Xoom costs $800 in the States, and while £500 would be a truer representation of the current exchange rate, £600 is about as good as we could've hoped, given we often just get the currency symbol replaced when UK pricing of tech is calculated.
The bad news, for Motorola, is that the iPad 2 will have more or less price parity with the Xoom and the old one will be £100 cheaper for equivalently specced models. Many will argue that the Xoom has a better hardware spec than even the iPad 2, but it doesn't have the momentum, the brand, the ad budget or the apps. Furthermore the iPad 2 will be available sooner, and in volume.
Until some serious killer apps start being released for Honeycomb, we suspect the only people that will be buying the Xoom, or indeed any other non-Apple tablets, will be those who are religiously opposed to Apple. But then again, that's a pretty sizable market.
Incidentally, talking about other tablets, while researching this story we noticed that Expansys is listing 5 May as the availability date for the HTC Flyer. There was nothing on the new Samsung, Blackberry or HP tablets that we could see.
