Once the last great hope of device manufacturers looking to topple the iPad colossus with a tablet of their own, the Motorola Xoom — the first tablet running Android 3.0 Honeycomb — has been a bust, largely thanks to the simultaneous launch of the iPad 2. It is estimated that Motorola has sold less than 100,000 Xooms since the tablet was launched in February, compared to a million first-month sales of the first-gen iPad (and much higher if unreported unit sales of the iPad 2).
Now, manufacturers preparing their own Honeycomb tablets are bracing for their own failures, with at least two upcoming tablets postponing their launch dates as their faith in Honeycomb as a viable platform upon which to mount a true iPad killer wanes.
According to Digitimes, because Google has been “unable to offer sufficient support” for Android 3.0 with its partners, Asus will be delaying the launch of their upcoming Eee Pad Transformer tablet by up to a month, from an original April 15th launch.
HTC has also followed suit, postponing volume production of its upcoming Honeycomb-based Flyer tablet, which is due to launch in the second quarter of this year.
According to Digitimes, the main sources of fear for Android tablet makers right now include “brand image, pricing, insufficient applications and the unstable performance of Android 3.0.”
In other words, manufacturers fear that Honeycomb lacks literally everything that makes the iPad so special. Is Honeycomb dead in the water as a tablet OS? If so, given the Playbook’s abysmal reviews, that leaves only one strong contender for challenging the iPad’s domination of the tablet market: HP’s webOS 3.0 based TouchPad, due out later this year.
