Speculation is the game of fools.
Pagan jim
According to Business Insider, Motorola’s Xoom tablet is a ‘flop’ having only sold 100,000 units so far. But are these numbers accurate? Do they even matter?
First thing to bear in mind is that these aren’t Motorola sales figures, they are instead the figures an analyst came up with:
According to an estimate from Deutsche Bank, Motorola has only sold 100,000 Xooms thus far. Deutsche Bank got its estimate after looking at the Android developer website to see how many people were using Honeycomb.
The Guardian’s Charles Arthur does an excellent job of explaining the origins of these figures:
It’s official! The Xoom is a flop! Thus quoth Silicon Alley Insider, running its inky finger down a note that has emerged from Deutsche Bank, where an analyst - we’ll see if we can join the dots for you - saw John Gruber’s (of Daring Fireball) link to the Android Developer statistics, which show - at present - that more than 65% of Android devices which access the Android Market in the past 14 days are running “Froyo” 2.2, for example.. but only 0.2% are running “Honeycomb”, the tablet-only Android version.
The analyst then, aided by some ComScore 2011 numbers on adoption of Android in the US site:comscore.com, and decided that the 0.2% showing there for Android 3.0 (”Honeycomb”) translated into 100,000 sales of the Xoom.
OK, so this 100,000 number is based data, but the way the data’s been twisted and manipulated and interpreted, it could be nothing more than a guess … or a lot worse than a guess.
It’s a number.
But assuming it’s near to accurate (and I always hate assuming …) does it represent success or failure? After all, Apple’s pretty much stitched up the tablet market, with ‘iPad’ having become almost synonymous with ‘tablet’ in the minds of consumers.
Until we get better numbers (numbers that don’t need Nostradamus to decipher them) I’m withholding judgement for now.
Anyone here bought a Xoom?
