- By Mike Isaac
Someone screwed up at Best Buy this morning, letting slip two big product release dates. Now we may be seeing a new Android-powered tablet and smartphone sooner than we thought.
Onsale dates for Motorola’s new Xoom tablet and HTC’s Thunderbolt smartphone were posted to a Best Buy retailer’s Facebook page early Friday morning. According to the Grand Rapids, Michigan Best Buy store’s status update, we should expect the Xoom to debut on February 23 and the Thunderbolt on February 14.
The status update has been promptly taken down from the page, as the higher ups at Motorola and HTC probably wanted to wait to announce the product debuts at Mobile World Conference, a major mobile industry event occurring in Barcelona, Spain in mid-February.
We can’t say for sure whether or not the release dates will be firm. “The info from the Grand Rapids store was posted in error, as the details included are not yet finalized,” a Best Buy spokesperson told Wired.com. “We will share updated and accurate information when we have it.”
Details on the Xoom have been sparse since the tablet’s announcement at CES in early January. Speculation has filled the void of information — a previously leaked internal Best Buy memo showed a potential $800 price tag for the Xoom, which will run on the upcoming Android update to version 3.0 (Honeycomb). We do know, however, that the tablet touts a 1-GHz dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, a 5-megapixel back facing camera, and a 2-megapixel front facing camera for video chat.
Motorola’s upcoming Xoom-promoting Super Bowl ad will also tease the company’s tablet, while simultaneously taking a shot at Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl ad, making the Cupertino-based company out to be an Orwellian version of itself:
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