Motorola Ships Just 440,000 Tablets

Motorola recently launched their first Honeycomb tablet, i.e. the XOOM into the Indian market. It made its shelf debut a few months earlier though in the US, showcasing Google's Android Honeycomb OS aka version 3.0. The latest is that Motorola was getting ready to deliver version 3.1 to their XOOM tablet but the big question is, would that really help with boosting sales figures of the device? According to ZDNET,  a mere 440,000 units of the XOOM were shipped.

The XOOM got off to a rocky start for a number of reasons like the lack of proper Flash support at launch which took away the glory of full web browsing on the large display (the iPad took that and laughed its way to the bank). It then had issues with a buggy Honeycomb stock UI making functionality a big problem. Google, of course, took the heat for this “faux pas”. Next Motorola decided to flaunt the fact that their XOOM featured external memory support via a card reader. With this ability to add to the existing on-board memory, arch rival iPad couldn’t stand a chance. Wrong! The feature had bugs that caused issues with reading memory cards inserted.

Motorola's Android-based Honeycomb Tablet

The fourth time around Motorola teamed up with US service provider Verizon to help further promotion for the XOOM. For some reason though the ad campaign fizzled as consumers were not really able to figure out just what aspect of the XOOM Motorola was selling. A hardware upgrade was also promised, but has failed to make it out yet. The competition for a product that was once touted as a serious ‘iPad Assassin’ has grown with the likes of the Galaxy Tab 10.1-inch and iPad 2 sales still going strong.

The XOOM, it seems was dead on arrival but Android tablet sales in general have been quite average at best when compared to the ever popular iPad 2. With just 440,000 devices shipped, not sold, the XOOM has a long way to go before it can stand up to the power of the almighty iPad.