Motorola’s upcoming Honeycomb tablet will arrive in just six days and it looks like the official product name is going to be the Droid XOOM, according a tip posted by the often-reliable Kellen of Droid Life. His source also went on to say that the device will not have a built-in LTE radio which lead many to believe it would not support Verizon’s 4G network, but don’t that news burst your 4G-bubble quite yet.
Our sources say that Verizon will be selling an optional LTE modem that will plug in to a PCI express expansion slot found on the tablet. This would make sense because not everyone lives in Verizon’s 4G coverage area (it’s only 38 markets) and most people will not want to pay the $50-80 monthly fee for 4G data.
I’m one of those people that does not have access to Verizon 4G quite yet, so I’m actually quite happy with the no-LTE-modem news since it’s likely to keep the overall cost down. If anything, this will increase the chances that I go out and buy the XOOM when it launches.
While we are on the topic of Motorola’s tablet, I’m still hearing that Honeycomb will in fact be Android 2.4 and not Android 3.0 like many sites are reporting. I’ve already seen several devices that were running Android 2.4 in our site analytics logs, so it looks like some of the testers have been reading our Honeycomb news.
We have also heard that Verizon will be advertising this tablet during the Super Bowl on February 6th and it should go on sale by February 14th. In addition to being Valentines Day, that is also the opening of Mobile World Congress where Google CEO Eric Schmidt will be giving a keynote speech. Everyone knows how these products get delayed at the last minute and launch dates get shifted, but the February 14th date looks pretty certain at this point.
Check back next Wednesday and hopefully we will have some hands-on videos of the Motorola Droid XOOM.
Bonus video: For an idea of what the LTE modem might look like check out this video from Vincent Nguyen of Slashgear that was filmed during the last CES. This is of an older ICD Ultra prototype that was being shown off, but it was running on Verizon 4G using a Motorola LTE modem and powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 processor.
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