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Motorola is throwing Apple’s own iconic marketing muscle back into its mighty face as it prepares to launch the iPad-challenging Xoom tablet computer.
Notably, the company that has pinned its hopes on Android is airing an ad during the Super Bowl Feb. 6 that is designed to denigrate the iPad and pump up the Xoom, which sports a 10.1-inch screen powered by the Google Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system.
Incidentally, Google is showing off Honeycomb on the Xoom at the Googleplex Feb. 2 (that’s today!)
“2011 looks a lot like 1984,” Motorola claimed. “One authority. One design. One way to work. It’s time for more choices.”
The ad then veers into a list of Xoom’s cool features, including the dual-core 1GHz processor, 1080 HD video, cameras for video chat, and its ability to run data at 4G speeds when Verizon’s 4G LTE (Long-Term Evolution) network is ready.
Oh, and it plays Flash. I’m so sick of that as a selling point. Consumers don’t know enough to care.
Here’s the ad on YouTube:
Unfortunately, the ad, a riff on Apple’s iconic ad that skewered IBM and its proprietary computing ways, will shoot over the heads of the vast majority of football-loving, hot-wing-eating Americans who see it this Sunday.
And for the minority of high-tech enthusiasts, it feels like a bad rerun of the enthusiastic speech Google’s Vic Gundotra gave at Google I/O last May when he raved about Apple’s closed iOS ecosystem.
So the video made me wince. I’m saying this as someone who has played with an iPad enough, and is eagerly awaiting the chance to test the Xoom and other Honeycomb tablets to see which I might like to purchase.
In other words, I didn’t like the iPad enough to buy one. But others did. Apple sold 15 million iPads last year, give or take. People like it. It’s a good tablet, even without cameras and a bunch of ports. Motorola doesn’t have much to pick on.
Hopefully, the Xoom will speak for itself better than Motoroa’s marketing message speaks for the tablet, which is slated to drop later this month or in early March.