Motorola Mobility shipped 250,000 Xoom tablets in the first month the device was available, the company said on Thursday as part of its first-quarter earnings report.
The tablet, the first to run Google’s Android Honeycomb OS, went on sale in late February. Within weeks, several analysts said early sales were disappointing. In early April, one analyst estimated that Motorola had sold a total of 100,000 of the tablets.
Shipping a quarter of a million in a month isn’t quite the same as initial iPad shipments, but the number appears to be better than many had expected.
During the quarter, Motorola Mobility also started selling the Atrix, a phone that can be docked into a device with a full keyboard and monitor. Some analysts have also said sales of the Atrix are weak.
The company did not pull out Atrix sales numbers. It said it shipped 9.3 million mobile devices, including 4.1 million smartphones, during the quarter.
Still, it reported a loss of $0.27 per share on net revenue of $3.0 billion. The loss is better than the $0.72 per share it lost in the first quarter this year. Net revenue was up 22 percent from the first quarter of 2010. Analysts polled by Thomson Financial had given an average forecast of $2.84 billion in revenue. Excluding certain items, Motorola Mobility reported a loss of $0.08 per share, beating the analysts’ forecast of a $0.12 loss per share.
The company expected a challenging first quarter, in part due to new competition at Verizon from the iPhone. The Droid franchise at Verizon has been a big driver of sales for Motorola.
Motorola Mobility, which separated from its parent company in early January, has two groups: Mobile Devices, which makes phones, and Home, which makes set-top boxes and other IPTV equipment. Spinning off the mobility division was part of the company’s strategy to turn around lagging results.
Nancy Gohring covers mobile phones and cloud computing for The IDG News Service. Follow Nancy on Twitter at @idgnancy. Nancy’s e-mail address is Nancy_Gohring@idg.com