You can’t beat Apple at being Apple

Open…and Shut There’s a growing list of would-be iPad killers born each month, but none yet to grok the central message that made Android beat the iPhone: cheapness.

Motorola and others may have all sorts of reasons for why their tablets are superior to Apple’s iPad, but until the price tag is significantly lower, their devices are going to sit on the shelves as museum pieces. Motorola’s mobility head, Sanja Jha, articulates a bevy of reasons for why the Xoom tablet is worth its $799 price, the primary one being “our ability to deliver 50Mb/s [will] justify the $799 price point.”

But he’s wrong. For one thing, though the Xoom comes with Verizon’s lightning-fast 4G network access, “Verizon’s new 4G LTE network is so fast that you can use up your entire 5GB, $50 monthly allotment in 32 minutes,” as PC Mag’s Sascha Segan found. So forget the cost of the device for a minute: once a consumer actually starts tapping into the power of the Xoom and its network, the consumer is going to be paying through the nose in data overage charges. Ouch.

But there’s a bigger reason few consumers are going to be willing to pay the same price for a Xoom (or any other tablet) as they would for an iPad: it’s not an iPad. The default brand that consumers associate with tablets is Apple. That’s where the cachet is. So long as its a Motorola Xoom, a RIM PlayBook, etc., it’s got to be cheaper or it’s not going to sell. (The only possible exception to this is Android-based devices, because Android has a great brand all its own, but even Android is ultimately successful because it’s cheaper. More on that below). There really isn’t any good way around this, either.

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