Motorola Xoom Coming to Australia With Telstra [Australian Carrier Telstra Confirms That They Will Be Offering The First Honeycomb Tablet Sometime in May, Pricing Unannounced]

Posted on TFTS by Kevin Schram on Saturday, 23. April 2011 under: PCs, Notebooks, Netbooks & Tablets

Do you live down under but have your heart set on the Motorola Xoom? You could import a WiFi-only version from somewhere at great expense, but it now looks like Telstra will be offering the Honeycomb tablet natively with 3G connectivity sometime in the future. Website Ausdroid is reporting that Telstra confirmed to them that Oz will be getting the Xoom tablet.

No pricing information was announced, but it does look like the Xoom will be dropping in Australia sometime in May. Pricing wise, you’ve got to expect Telstra to heavily subsidize the price in exchange for a monthly tariff with data. Like in Europe, Telstra gives away most of their mobiles for free (or actually A$1) with a contract. I doubt they’ll give the price Xoom away for free, but they could drop it to a respectable A$100-200 (though that’s just conjecture on my part).

Warwick Bray, Executive Director at Telstra, has been quoted by Ausdroid as saying about the Xoom:

Motorola Xoom arrives at a time when Australians are embracing both mobile tablets and devices powered by Android in record numbers.

Telstra currently is offering a respectable stable of Android devices, including the HTC Desire, the Sony Ericcson Xperia, the Samsung Galaxy S, among others. They don’t seem to offer any tablets though, but the decision to offer the Xoom is a good one. I reviewed the Xoom for this site a few months ago, and found it to be an excellent tablet with some occasionally buggy software. Nothing a few software patches can’t fix though…