Motorola launches Xoom, Atrix in SA
2011-08-19 11:05
Cape Town - Motorola SA launched the Motorola Xoom tablet and Atrix smartphone in South Africa on Wednesday.
The Xoom has been touted as an effective challenger to the dominance, in the tablet space, of Apple's iPad and was released internationally in May 2011.
With a 25cm screen, the Xoom falls into the larger tablet category and it runs the Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system which was specifically designed by Google for tablet devices.
Google recently bought Motorola Mobility Holdings for $12.5bn to help protect its fast-growing Android mobile operating system.
The Xoom is the first tablet to run the Honeycomb OS and features a 1GHz dual core processor and 1GB of RAM.
Flash
Unlike the iPad, it sports a memory card slot and also supports Flash for rich web content.
Both touch screen devices have front and rear cameras and Motorola claims that the battery life is better than competing Android powered devices.
They also support 3.5mm earphone jacks and mini-USB connections that have become the industry standard.
Some analysts have suggested that Google's move to buy Motorola Mobility may make Asian manufactures like Samsung and HTC nervous because they depend on the free Android OS for their mobile devices.
But Google said that it partners with many device manufacturers.
"We don't have any preferential treatment to all our OEMs, handset manufacturers," Brett St Clair Google SA head of mobile told News24.
"Android is an open operating system that anybody can use, put on any device. Any of our competitors can install their software or applications on there and we want it to be open," he added.
According to Motorola, the Atrix is designed to be a "digital hub to create, edit and interact with documents, media and content" and the smartphone also features the Android 2.2 (Froyo) OS.
Both devices will be available on contract, but the manufacturer has said the recommended retail price of R5 799 for the Atrix, and R6 599 for the Xoom.
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