It looks like 2011 wasn’t a very good year for Motorola in the tablet market. But is anyone really surprised about this? After all, Motorola is the reason why the Android tablet market started growing so slowly in 2011. They tarnished the Android tablets’ name with a tablet that started at $800, more than 50% more expensive than an iPad, and which barely offered much else.
It didn’t have a very good display, Honeycomb worked pretty poorly on it, it didn’t have the promised Flash at launch, and it also didn’t have the 4G it was promising at launch, that would be upgraded at a later date. Oh, and to top it all, it was as thick as the original tablet, when they knew iPad was was just weeks away from launch, and Apple blew everyone away with a tablet that was 33% thinner and lighter.
Maybe you could forgive Motorola if that was the only time they showed they didn’t understand the tablet market, but since then it has kept releasing a few tablet models that were still overpriced and without anything special to impress with. So is it time for Motorola to completely get out of the tablet market?
If it wasn’t for the acquisition by Google, I’d say that Motorola doesn’t understand this market and never will. But now that Google is acquiring them, it will basically be Google who will decide everything about their tablets. And I have a feeling that Google will understand this market a whole lot better than Motorola ever did.
Plus, now that Google has watched Amazon’s successful Kindle Fire, they might even get Motorola to release a $100-$200 tablet that runs very well with Android 4.0, and offers all of Google’s content on it, as well as all the applications in the Android Market, which are a lot more than whatever Amazon has in their app store.