The First Good Android Tablet Has Locked Down Wi-Fi and charges $800, Ughhhh [Unconfirmed]

The Motorola Xoom sure has lots of whizbang stuff inside: Crazy dual-core processors! Nvidia graphics! HD camcorder! 1GB RAM! Front camera! 3G that’s somehow magically upgradeable to 4G! But, uh, it’s eight hundred dollars . And it gets worse.

The worse being fine print in the leaked Best Buy ad that announces:

To activate WiFi functionality on this device, at the least one month data subscription is required.

Like Engadget, we are able to’t decide any wrong way to translate that besides the Xoom’s Wi-Fi is locked down until you activate an information subscription with Verizon. They’re requiring you to buy at the least one month of knowledge service to a basic feature of the hardware? What. The. Balls.

The pricing is horribly wrong for a number of reasons on top of that. One, there isn’t a cheaper option. While the most costly iPad with 3G and 64GB of storage was $830, people still had the way to purchase a group of cheaper models, right down to $500. In other words, the iPad cost as much as a netbook; the Xoom costs as much as a laptop.

And while the Xoom’s guts are steelier than the iPad’s straight away-justifying the cost difference-that probably won’t be the case in a just more than one months, when a new iPad’s more likely to manifest. Historically, Apple’s next-generation gear tends to have sparkly new specs while maintaining an identical pricepoints. Meaning the Xoom’s $800 ticket isn’t going to appear any better, so hopefully Moto’s promised Wi-Fi model is coming sooner, not later.

Don’t get me wrong, the explanation the pricing seems so gross is that we’ve been expecting nearly a year for some real iPad competiton . And at $800, with required data service, I believe Moto will mostly be selling them to diehard nerds.

If Motorola really wanted to kill the iPad, they’d undercut it. Here’s to misprints. [ Engadget ]

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This post is tagged: dual core processors, hd camcorder, information subscription, knowledge service, next generation