14 DAY TRIAL // The highly anticipated Motorola Xoom Android tablet has just been officially confirmed by Verizon for a February 24th release. The device will be available for $599.99 with a new two-year plan or for $799.99 without any contract.
Despite the fact that the tablet is going for a rather high price, even with a contract, it looks like it will not feature 4G LTE support at launch.
However, the carrier claims the Motorola Xoom will be upgradable to 4G LTE services at no additional cost in the second quarter of 2011.
Verizon has also revealed the starting data plan price available for the Motorola Xoom, which will be $20 per month for 1GB of data.
Unfortunately, the specified price is only for the “3G data service,” which means that 4G services will be more expensive, as soon as the device will be compatible with LTE.
Even though prices for additional tiers haven't been disclosed yet, customers should expect prices similar to those of the recently announced Cr-48 Chrome OS tablet: $35 per month for 3GB or $50 per month for 5GB.
Motorola Xoom will be one of the first tablets available on the market to run Android 3.0 Honeycomb, Google's mobile platform especially designed for larger touchscreen displays.
Verizon Motorola Xoom lacks CDMA voice communication capabilities, but offers a wide range of connectivity features such as Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Rev. A, up to 3.1 Mbps, as well as Bluetooth with 2.1 with A2DP and EDR support.
The device is built around a powerful 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 AP20H Dual Core processor and the 10.1-inch widescreen HD display (800 x 1280 pixels resolution).
The sleek and stylish tablet packs a 5-megapixel camera with autofocus and dual-LED flash, which is capable of capturing 720p video. In addition, the front-facing 2-megapixel camera for video-chats comes in handy, as the tablet lacks voice call capabilities.