Best Buy lists Motorola Xoom at $1,200, then pulls it

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Handhelds, Rumors

Motorola seems to be readying its forthcoming Xoom tablet to take on the dominant device on the market, Apple's iPad. But on Sunday, a pre-order page on Best Buy's Web site showed a staggering $1,199.99 price tag for the Xoom.

That's about $400-$500 more than the rumored price for the 32 GB tablet, and much more than a $729 iPad with similar specs.

Unveiled early last month at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the Xoom is the first tablet to run on Google's tablet-optimized platform, Android 3.0 "Honeycomb." PCMag analyst Tim Gideon said the Motorola Xoom is "perhaps, the first tablet truly armed to take on the mighty iPad."

It's not a comparison that has happened by accident. Motorola has pitted itself against Apple in ads for the Xoom. In Motorola's one minute Super Bowl ad titled "Empower the People," a young guy commutes to work surrounded by fellow travelers who are all dressed in white jumpsuits, plugged in via Apple's familiar white earbuds. The man uses his Xoom to create an animation for his office crush, who is inspired to remove her earbuds and presumbly join the real world.

A few weeks before this commercial debuted, Motorola took another dig at Apple in a teaser on YouTube.

Motorola has not released official pricing information about the Xoom. It's been rumored that the device would be released Feb. 24, but there has been no confirmation from Motorola. According to many reports, that would slate the Xoom for release right around the time that Apple would announce the next-generation iPad.

The iPad has been the dominant tablet on the market. In the first nine months since its release in April of 2010, Apple sold 14.8 million of them, earning $4.6 billion, Apple said in a recent earnings report. Not only is the price that Best Buy listed for the Xoom more than an iPad, it's more than the base price of a MacBook Air ($999) and it's the same price as an 11-inch MacBook Pro. If Motorola wants to nab the tablet throne from Apple, it probably won't happen if the device is really priced so high.

Best Buy has removed the preorder page that advertised the Xoom. Reps from neither Best Buy nor Motorola immediately responded to a request for comment.

This article, written by Leslie Horn, originally appeared on PCMag.com and is republished on Gear Live with the permission of Ziff Davis, Inc..