With Motorola pitting their tablet against Apple's mentality. I expected the Xoom to be the same price as the best iPad, maybe less. Engadget posted the price of the Xoom, it's $799 before any service contracts. That's $30 less than the best iPad at $829.
Sadly, you get less with the Xoom.
The Xoom comes with a paltry 1 GB of internal storage. To make up the memory difference an SD card is required. All of the 64 GB SD cards that I find are over $100. With the SD card the Xoom is $899, and the iPad $829.
The Xoom is at least $70 more expensive. That's before the astronomically priced data plans.
Which is where the real money is. Both Verizon and AT&T really gouge their customers on these data plans. To be fair Verizon's data plans aren't as bad as AT&T's. 10GB on Verizon's network costs $80. On AT&T's that cost is $125. Within 2 months on most of AT&T's network the cost of the Xoom is recouped.
That's an incredible amount of money. Even as a successful professional with a penchant for expensive gadgets, the first year cost ($1860) of a Xoom makes me gag. There are so many other gadgets that I could buy with that money, and still buy a data plan from T-Mobile for half the cost.
Motorola may be touting the Xoom as a change in mentality, away from Apple. The "Apple Premium" is a well known cost, what's different about the Xoom's pricing?
