“According to sources from upstream suppliers… Motorola’s Xoom orders in the second quarter will drop gradually each month, and orders will only last till the end of June,” Yenting Chen and Joseph Tsai report for DigiTimes.
“Motorola’s orders will drop to around 300,000 units in April and below 300,000 units in May,” Chen and Tsai report. “The sources believe the unclear market status of iPad-like tablet PCs is the reason for Motorola to reduce its orders and the company may launch a new Xoom model in the second half after evaluating the situation.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Here’s the situation, Motorola: You can’t compete with Apple. Repeat after us: iDon’t have the scale. iDon’t have the talent. iDon’t have the ecosystem. iDon’t have the OS. iDon’t have the R&D. iDon’t have the apps. iDon’t have a chance.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
iPad 2 benchmarks destroy Motorola Xoom – March 13, 2011
Ars Technica reviews Motorola Xoom: For the best tablet available today, look no further than Apple – March 7, 2011
TechCrunch: Apple iPad 2: Good; Motorola Xoom: Bad – March 5, 2011
Motorola releases portion of Super Bowl ad portraying Apple users as Orwellian drones (with video) – February 4, 2011
Motorola announces 10.1-inch ‘XOOM’ Android tablet – January 5, 2011
BGR reviews iPad 2: Apple is winning – March 18, 2011
Computerworld reviews Apple’s iPad 2: ‘The Holy Grail of computing’ – March 16, 2011
Ars Technica reviews Apple iPad 2: Big performance gains in a slimmer package
iPad 2 benchmarks destroy Motorola Xoom – March 13, 2011
Associated Press reviews Apple iPad 2: Apple pulls further ahead – March 10, 2011
Ars Technica reviews Motorola Xoom: For the best tablet available today, look no further than Apple – March 7, 2011
PC Mag reviews Apple iPad 2: The tablet to get; Editors’ Choice – March 10, 2011
Associated Press reviews Apple iPad 2: Apple pulls further ahead – March 10, 2011
PC Mag reviews Apple iPad 2: The tablet to get; Editors’ Choice – March 10, 2011
Pogue reviews Apple iPad 2: Thinner, lighter, and faster transforms the experience – March 10, 2011
Baig reviews Apple iPad 2: Second to none – March 10, 2011
Sometimes it’s best to just quit.
Not surprised at all.
They saw the iPad, and they realised it’s back to the drawing board. Sell whatever you have promised your OEM maker you were going to order from them and close up that shop, hoping that your engineers can somehow miraculously copy that iPad in the next two months and figure out how to get components cheap enough so that you don’t have to sell the thing at loss in order to compete.
Sad story, really…
Some people never learn.
At least Motorola has seen the handwriting on the acceptance numbers and cut their losses quickly. Smart.
But… but… but… it has FLASH !!!
Not yet. That must be the entire reason for its failure.
You mean “it’s gone in a Flash”.
Actually, you can hack Flash onto it. I know someone who owns a Xoom, put Android 3 Honeycomb on it, and installed Flash so that he could play Cityville full screen. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcwestbrook/5538741188/
Yep, only the geeks would try to squeeze anything worthwhile out of that POS. Everybody else is running the other way.
I thought that the Xoom shipped with Honeycomb (aka Android 3.0) by default. If was the Flash component that wasn’t ready. Are you sure that you know what your friend really did?
Thompson
It’s not only that Flash is not ready but Motorola also has many placeholders for features in its tablet that are still months, or maybe years, or not at all to be implemented. It’s only snake oil that Motorola is foisting on the consumers
Hey, since that’s my photo I guess I’ll reply.
The Xoom ships with Honeycomb, and yes Flash wasn’t available at launch. Flash is officially available now (v10.2). Cityville is a badly programmed resource hog – so that is what I threw at it fully expecting it to crash.
Thank you internet for reminding me how stupid I am!
“The sources believe the unclear market status of iPad-like tablet PCs..”
Unclear to anyone that’s not Apple it seems..
Right. It didn’t say “the unclear market status of iPad’s”
On a scale of 1-10, I’d give Motorola a 10 for showing enough balls to launch the Zoom a week before the iPad.
But on that same 1-10 scale I’d give Motorola a 1 for not having enough brains to realize that running beta software – Android Honeycomb & Adobe mobile Flash – on top of beta hardware is a surefire recipe for failure. But you gotta start somewhere with tablets so Motorola took a gamble that didn’t pay off.
As for those retards at RIM, is there a negative 1-10 scale for stupidity? Not only do their dumbphones suck, they look like throwbacks to the Nineties. The Playbook reflects this retarded thinking of IT managers still stuck in the vortex of a time warp.
Those two co-CEOs must have time travelled backwards to find a solution for the Playbook. Total fail.
Imagine an android loving purchasing manager of a retail outlet who convinced his skeptical boss to order a huge bunch of galaxy tabs and xooms and is now left with piles of unsold inventory…
across the street there are still lines waiting to buy the iPad 2…
the only lines for the xoom are people returning them and those queueing up to ask “why did my xoom crash 6 times yesterday and why did the app scale up so that the game controls are off screen (true comment from a reviewer) and why does my wife’s iPad battery run 4 hours longer (as noted by Wall street Journal) “.
Xoom may be doomed, but today over at Engadget they are showing two new Samsung tablets that would appear to be a real competitor to iPad. Priced the same as iPad. One of them is even bigger, faster, and hard to believe, actually thinner and lighter than iPad 2. Why hasn’t MDN gotten info about these yet?
Yea, encased in a plastic box at CTIS and not running. Just mock ups. Let’s see what they actually do when they actually work. Vaporware
I went over to the Engadget website to check out what you said about the Samsung Tab.
Do you know the difference between a preproduction mock up & an iPad 2 that’s currently shipping?
It’s obvious to me without being sarcastic that you left your brains at home. The Tab as reviewed by Engadget doesn’t even power on!!! Only a retard would call that competition – that’s about the shape of things to come as vaporous as anything out there.
BLM, could you please remind Hughb and the rest of us the exact value of a review of a mock-up product? 😛
A non-functional, non-existent product can do anything and cost any amount, because it is mythical. If the little gas station in my little town has no gas in the pumps, they could advertise it at $2.25/gal., they don’t have it anyway. When they get some, they’ll just adjust the price to the $3.64 it was when they had it.
That’s the difference between mythical tablets, and magical ones. Magical ones actually exist. (although I’m not COMPLETELY sold on the ‘magical’ tag, but I think other vaporfacturers might be).
Maybe they should get the Macalope or his buddy Winotaur to review them…… who better to review an mythical product than a mythical beast?
Thanks for the retard comment. Always helps these discussions to bring the level up like that. I simply said they “would appear to be a real competitor” not that they are. I guess I have just read so much dumping on all things not Apple that I should know one should never ever do anything but preach to the choir here. I have been an Apple guy since my first Mac in 1984, and believe it or not there have been other good gadgets by other companies in that span. But don’t tell anyone here, though, they will call you retarded.
Buddy, you were looking at something right out of the Microsoft Courier vaporware handbook. They are months away from having a working product. How can that possibly look like a real competitor when it is just a case with no hardware, OS software or Apps? It doesn’t even have potential.
I’ll tell you one thing though, the Microsoft Courier team is scared shitless.
Okay, so… Are you telling me it’s smart to proclaim that the empty plastic shells serving as mock-ups for two non-existent Samsung tablets appear to be “real competitors to the iPad”?
Hey, guess what. I’m going to build a tablet myself. It’s going to be the best one ever. See? Here’s a mock-up! It the exact size, shape, and weight as a piece of paper. It even flexes like paper! Wow! Infact it’s so super awesome advanced it looks like I merely drew a tablet on a piece of paper in crayon! And it’s 10x faster than the iPad 2. With Adobe Flash. Also, 50 USB ports.
It’s a real competitor. There’s no denying that. Right, Hugh?
LOL! Great and refreshing comeback, hughb.
I too dislike name-calling when someone expresses an opinion around here. Thanks for keeping the discussion above that level.
Please name me some great amazing gadgets not made by Apple, Hugh.. Name some! (lol)
Non-functional mockups, not due for another 3 months. Why exactly should MDN be talking about them?
As for being “bigger, faster, …” can we at least see it work before coming to conclusions?
“As for being “bigger, faster, …” can we at least see it work before coming to conclusions?”
EXACTLY!
You mean, as opposed to talking about the iPhone 5 three months in advance of its release?
Yeah, the new tablets are behind a plastic and not functioning. Their old unreleased tablets are supposedly functioning as demos.
WS is fighting aapl by press release, hoping to stymie any price movement in aapl stock.
It’s amazing to watch these companies commit the same mistake over and over – they fail to understand that it’s the OS and apps which make the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch such runaway successes.
Then again, it’s not like Motorola has much choice. Google can’t put out a good Android tablet version, and no one else has shown enough gumption to develop its own OS.
Imagine how much money a third party OS developer could make by creating a slick, fast, mobile OS that could compete with iOS. Much easier said than done, but certainly there is someone out there with the ability to create something better than Windows, Android, Symbian, etc.
HP Palm?
Apple’s innovation has never been more apparent, as we watch these “competitors” trying to match the iPhone and iPad in price and quality. Apple has learned so much with R & D, because they are creating, not copying. That is why they are where they are.
So the competitors just keep touting features. Apple understands that it is all about the user experience of these devices.”True Multitasking”… what is that? I can have multiple apps running, and they return to exactly where I left off when I come back. Is it because they stop computing in the background? And expansion ports? Really? Expanding to what? Apple does it all with WiFi and additional cables to their single 30 pin thin connector, which, incidentally, every vendor has access to.
And when you think about the idea of selling at a loss, Apple could actually do it, as the App store is generating so much revenue for them. But, ironically, they are the only ones that currently don’t have to sell at a loss, because of their refinements and supply muscle.
Go Apple!
I remember back about 1960 my dad bought me a small transistor AM radio, it was a Motorola. I was proud of my radio, it had style and had a metal face with wire mesh speaker grill. (model X15) Most small transistor radios were all plastic with unknown names, and mine was a Motorola. In about 3 or 4 years I had 2 different Motorola transistor radios, they were great. Fast forward to the present… where did they go wrong ? They should be ashamed..
Just another company who managed to destroy themselves over the years. Lack of vision and leadership.
Very true and your insightfulness brought back great childhood memories!
I’m a volunteer emergency responder. What’s sad is my 20 year old Motorola radio works better than my Moto radio that’s just a couple years old.
The old uses hardware (crystals?( for frequency programming, the new are digital. Maybe that’s part of it?
Or is it perhaps because your old one was made in USA?
Being Canadian, my first transistor radio was Sony’s first kick at the cat. For some reason they marketed in Canada before selling to Americans. That Sony radio is worth big bucks now. Too bad I took it apart to see how it worked.
iFailed.
Has anyone notified the next of KIN?
“TouchWiz UX or TouchWiz 4.0”
Right.
As a business owner I respect the fact that Motorola have the power to make such wise decisions and such drastic ones to save themselves. Gees if it was Microsoft they would have made it anyway
This lack of a future in PC hardware would explain HP’s desperate rush to the cloud.
DOA!
“Motorola’s orders will drop to around 300,000 units in April and below 300,000 units in May,”…
If those numbers are true, Wow! So many ways one can break down those numbers…
10,000 units a day for a month… 200 units per state (50 states)… how many BB stores are carrying this thing again? Or Verizon stores or where ever?
The main number is this… with all the heavy prime time advertising I’ve seen just on tv, let’s hope that Motorola has sold enough Xooms to pay off that incurred debt alone…
Bloodbath.
You mean it’s *not* working? Oh, but the advertisers are working so hard to woo buyers by telling them it’s simply a matter of what features you like – Obvious XOOM features like UI lag, crashing, locking up, and getting viruses. Little features like that!
I am back again. Now Computerworld is raving about the new Samsung tablets as well. Richi Jennings there says “it actually blow past the new iPad 2”
So do these Samsung devices work or are they what all you folks say, just mockups. See computerworld please before calling me retarded again.
Read that Computerworld “article” again. It’s just a press release, full of phrases like “Samsung said all of the Galaxy Tab versions will…”
Nobody “raves” about it. The only thing they say that’s not from Samsung’s press release is “Ovum analyst Tony Cripps said the new 8.9 version ‘trumps the iPad 2’ in slimness and weight.” He’s taking that from the specs offered. Nobody at Computerworld or Ovum has touched one of these things.
Okay, now I saw Richi Jennings’ click bait blog post.
He does say the new Samsung Tabs “blow right past the new iPad 2”. But offers nothing more than fanboy praise for “the new platform to beat.” He doesn’t say he’s held one. He doesn’t offer hands on comparisons. He offers fanboy praise for a press release of a future product — coming this summer.
the proper phrase is “differently-tarded.”
heck, the Samsung Galaxy 10″ tab announced back in February still isn’t shipping yet, and now Samsung is hyping a newer 10″ Galaxy model for “the summer” (september 20th). great way to discourage your own current product sales. and there are still probably a lot more than one million of last year’s crippled 7″ Galaxy tabs sitting unsold in warehouses. is that ever a confusing market mess. what idiot is running Samsung – and how long will he last?
but Moto is going to get crunched by the flood of new Android and other OEM’s tabs coming to market soon. the Xoom goes quickly from being the only one with honeycomb to one of many. talk about a circular firing squad!
Suggest that the new Motorola Mobility CANNOT AFFORD to keep shipping a losing product else they risk losing it all. I’m guessing their pockests aren’t too deep right now…