How low can you go?
Further evidence of the increasing price pressure on non-Apple tablets comes in the form of yet another cut in the price of the Motorola Xoom in the UK.
The Dixons retail group has chopped another £70 off the price of a 32GB Wi-Fi only Xoom to bring it down to £329.99, and £80 off a 32GB 3G on to £399.99. Back when the Xoom first became available it was priced above the Apple iPad 2, and cost £500 for the Wi-Fi one, with an extra ton for 3G.
Before long the market realised that they at least need to match Apple for pricing, which charges £479 for the 32GB Wi-Fi iPad 2 and an extra hundred for 3G, so we got a twenty quid price cut. More recently the default pricing for the Xoom was moved to £400/£480, but it looks like even that wasn't enough for Dixons to shift sufficient stock, so no we've got another cut.
A recent visit to a local PC world revealed the two most prominent in-store displays were for the Xoom and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. The latter is going for £400/£500 - albeit with only 16GB storage - so maybe Dixons thought it needed to offer the older Xoom for less. And surely everyone is having to adjust to revised consumer expectations stemming from HP heavy discounting of the TouchPad.
On that note precentral got hold of some internal memos from HP attempting to rationalise the announcement from its CEO that he couldn't be bothered with webOS anymore. It seems HP will be merging the hardware and software parts of what was Palm into the associated divisions of HP itself. This would imply that HP has had no acceptable offers for the Palm unit.
Motorola and HP are in good company, it seems, as reports from the US have RIM axing the price of the BlackBerry PlayBook too.
