Following the recent furore surrounding the Motorola Xoom, consumers are once again up in arms over the planned pricing of the Motorola Atrix netbook dock.

American carrier, AT&T have rushed to the aid of the device, proclaiming it “more than just a netbook.”

AT&T – one of the largest providers of broadband in the US – had announced that a $500 price tag would be adorning the item on its U.S. release, an announcement that left consumers cold.

The company’s vice president, Mike Woodward was quick to legitimise the cost of Motorola’s new device:

“With all the integration between the phone and dock,” he explained. “You can do much more on an Atrix than you can on just a netbook. Other devices that try to do this just give you a mirror mode.”

The dock certainly is an innovative bit of kit – a slot to the rear of the netbook allows users to connect their Atrix mobile phone which can then be used via the desktop – and Woodward probably has some justification in being peeved at consumers who do not recognise that such innovation comes at a cost.

However, Motorola and AT&T are both guilty of misreading market trends and patterns with their promotion of this device; the increasing democratisation of the PC market means that consumers who are unhappy with the price of one device can very easily get their tech elsewhere.

Also, neither company seems to have recognised that being a big name in one sector doesn’t necessarily transfer to other sectors; releasing products at premium prices requires consumer confidence in your company as a producer of high-end devices. Motorola simply do not have that sort of market reputation in the PC sector.

Orange will be hoping to avoid a similar PR nightmare when they release the Atrix dock on this side of the Atlantic in the first half of 2011.

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Motorola have suffered a setback as they prepare to do battle with Apple’s iPad devices in the marketplace: consumers think the Xoom tablet is just too expensive.

The Xoom – due to be the first tablet to run Google’s Android Honeycomb OS – has had a $799 price tag slapped on it by US carriers Verizon Wireless and vendors Best Buy, in a move that could backfire for Motorola.

Additionally, buyers will have to shell out for a data plan to enable WiFi on the product, an extra cost that consumers are far from happy about. Putting these fees in context; the basic WiFi model of the iPad retails for $499 in the states and even the most expensive iPad costs just $30 more than the entry-level Xoom, and comes equipped with both WiFi and 3G.

Charles Golvin, an analyst for Forrester Research, said that the pricing represented an ignorance of consumer behaviour in the tablet market which could force wavering consumers back towards Apple and the iPad.

“This is very aggressive pricing in the face of consumers’ clear willingness to treat Apple products as the “gold standard” and worthy of a premium,” Golvin said. “Competing products [should] represent some kind of compromise, usually reflected in pricing.”

A poll conducted in January 2011 by Golvin’s colleague at Forrester, Sarah Rotman Epps, found that the average price consumers were willing to pay for a tablet device had almost halved since June 2010. Consumers are now unwilling to part with much more than $260, considerably below going rate for a Xoom tablet.

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