14 DAY TRIAL // Australian mobile phone carrier Optus is the second wireless services provider in the country set to make the Motorola XOOM tablet PC available for its customers in the near future.
The device is expected to become available for purchase in the country on the airwaves of Telstra on May 24th, and should be exclusive to this carrier for about one month.
Basically, this means that Optus would have the tablet PC added to its offering before June is over, and the carrier already confirmed the move.
Following Tesltra's announcement regarding the May 24th availability date for the XOOM, Optus stepped up and confirmed that it targets a mid to late June release for the tablet PC.
However, the wireless carrier did not offer specific info on the pricing of the new device, though it might be similar to Telstra's, which would have the XOOM available for $840.
Motorola XOOM was unveiled in January as the first tablet PC to run under Google's new Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system flavor, and was also the first such device to arrive on shelves.
The slate sports a 10.1-inch touchscreen display that can deliver a 1280 x 800-pixels resolution, as well as a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 application processor, with each core clocked in at 1GHz.
The Motorola XOOM also comes to the market with a 5-megapixel photo snapper on the back, complemented by a 2-megapixel camera on the front, for video calling.
It also sports 1GB of RAM, and 32GB of internal memory, complemented by a microSD memory card slot with support for up to 32GB of additional storage space (the slot is inactive, but Motorola promised a software update to activate it).
The XOOM comes with WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, as well as with 3G support included into the mix, though a WiFi-only model is also available.
XOOM is touted as one of the most advanced Android devices in the world. However, competitive products are already being pushed to shelves, coming from various makers around the world, including Acer, Asus, or Samsung.