Motorola Xoom, Just a Vapor Android Tablet?

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Apple made no secret yesterday that the iPad is a key product driving up its revenue and profit numbers. The company sold a lot of tablets this holiday season as it looks like the tablet has been a pretty popular Christmas gift, and not only. The logical question that rose from those attending the conference call was whether Apple is, in any way, threatened by the competition which is going to try to compete against the iPad as best they can this year.

Steve Jobs wasn’t available to comment on this conference call but Tim Cook continued Apple’s official bash of the competition and, he, most importantly, downplayed the upcoming Android tablets.

As you already know CES brought on a bunch of new tablets, powered by Windows 7, Android Honeycomb or QNX. webOS tablets are also going to be available this year, just for the record, but Tim Cook only mentioned Windows 7 and Android devices.

Here’s what he had to say on Windows 7 tablets:

The ones that are using a Windows-based operating system are generally fairly big and heavy and expensive. They have a very weak battery life, they require a keyboard or a stylus as an input device. And from our point of view and what we’ve seen, customers, frankly, just are not interested in them.

Well we can’t really say we’d argue with Apple there, although we still expect Microsoft to launch some sort of a tablet that could fight the iPad in the future.

When it comes to Android tablets he addressed both devices already on sale:

Then you have the Android tablet, the variety that are out shipping today, the operating system wasn’t really designed for a tablet. And Google has said this, and so this is not just an Apple view by any means. And so you wind up having a size of a tablet that is less than what we believe is reasonable or even one that would provide what we feel is a real tablet experience. And so basically, you wind up with kind of a scaled-up smartphone, which is a bizarre product in our view.

And those devices that were basically announced at CES:

The next-generation Android tablets, which are primarily what you mentioned in terms of the CES, there’s nothing shipping yet, and so I don’t know. Generally, they lack performance specs, they lack prices, they lack timing. And so today, they’re vapor.

So there you have it, folks, the Motorola Xoom, a potential flagship of Moto and definitely the kind of tablet we expect to shine against the iPad, is just “vapor.” Tim Cook didn’t actually stop to zoom in on it as the main iPad competitor, but the Xoom meets some of the criteria Cook mentioned, especially considering that we saw it live: it lacks prices and clear launch dates and we can’t say we saw a real working unit as Honeycomb wasn’t entirely done yet. But at least we do have official specs and features for this Honeycomb tablet which tell us we’re looking at an impressive machine that could take on the iPad

While Tim Cook doesn’t take hard hits like his CEO would do, he does tell the public that Apple is not really that scared of future iPad rivals. But that doesn’t mean Apple won’t take countermeasures:

We’ll assess them as they come out. However, we’re not sitting still. And we have a huge first-mover advantage. And we have an incredible user experience from iTunes to the App Store, and an enormous number of apps and a huge ecosystem.

What do you think about the next-gen Android tablets? Are you getting the Xoom the minute it comes out? What about the LG G-Slate or Dell Streak 7? Galaxy Tab LTE? What about the BlackBerry PlayBook?