Motorola Mobility revealed some new numbers concerning its heavily hyped Motorola Xoom tablet and it"s not good news. The company announced today that it only shipped 100,000 units of the Android 3.1-based device in the third quarter of 2011. Motorola didn"t reveal how many of those shipped tablets were actually sold to consumers which likely means that the sales number were even worse.
These numbers show how tough the tablet market is if your company"s name isn"t Apple. It"s iPad shipped a whopping 11.1 million units in the same time period. While there are rumors that Motorola is prepping a full fledged successor to the Xoom to be released, there have to be new questions about how well the device will do in the current climate where people seem to want the iPad but bypass everything else.
Everything else, that is, except for Amazon"s Kindle Fire. While the seven inch tablet isn"t due out until November 15, Amazon has said earlier this week that pre-order demand for the Android-based product has been so good so far that it is expanding production to make "millions" more Kindle Fires that it originally had planned to do.
That"s "millions" more, not "a hundred thousand" more. It sounds like Amazon has pretty much leapfrogged over the rest of the Android tablet makers with the cheap price and the online features of the Kindle Fire. We bet Motorola, Samsung and others are looking over the Kindle Fire"s price point and features very closely right now.