Verizon Wireless and Motorola Mobility (NYSE:MMI) aren’t content to sit idly by and let Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) gobble all of the Android tablet sales with the Kindle Fire.
The carrier is selling the Motorola Xoom 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) tablet for $199.99 on contract along with several other discounted Android devices Nov. 28 only as part of its Cyber Monday super sale.
The Xoom 4G LTE,which cost $499.99 when it launched Oct. 13 in the United States, is like its 3G predecessor but possesses a 4G radio to leverage the speeds of Verizon’s new LTE network, which promises up to 10 times the speeds of its 3G platform.
The Xoom 4G LTE has a 10.1-inch HD widescreen display, a 5 megapixel rear-facing camera paired with a 2 megapixel shutter in the front for video chat and is powered by a 1GHz dual-core processor.
While the original 3G Xoom launched with the first Android 3.0 Honeycomb build, the 4G LTE version is loaded with Android 3.2 , the last of the Honeycomb branch before Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) merged the smartphone and tablet branches in to Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” this holiday season.
At the $199.99 price, the Xoom 4G LTE is geared to compete with the Kindle Fire, which Amazon said today has been the hottest selling item on Amazon.com for the last eight weeks through Black Friday.
Verizon and Motorola also likely want to offload as many leftover Xooms as possible. Motorola said it sold only 200,000 of the Honeycomb tablets in the last quarter.
Verizon is also offering the HTC Droid Incredible 2 for free with a two-year contract, and the LG Revolution and Pantech Breakout Android 2.3 Gingerbread handsets for $49.99 with two-year data deals.
To lure users to those phones, Verizon is also offering 4GB of data for $30 a month, the company’s usual going rate for 2GB of data.