Edible Apple

Companies looking to take on Apple’s iPad are quickly finding out that it’s more of an uphill battle than they bargained for. Whereas Android was able to quickly catch up to the iPhone in terms of marketshare, the same cann’t be said for Android-based tablets.

This past quarter, Apple recorded record revenue thanks in part to unbelievably strong iPad sales – 9.2 million units to be exact. Earlier last week, Motorola announced that they sold just 440,000 units of its Xoom tablet during the quarter gone by. For the entire 2011 calendar year, Motorola anticipates sales of 1.3 to 1.5 million tablets. Apple meanwhile sells over 1.5 million iPads every two weeks.

Further crystallizing Motorola’s struggles to get the Xoom up and running, the ~1.5 million figure cited by Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha refers to the number of units Motorola plans on delivering to distributors, not the actual number of units it anticipates will end up in the hands of consumers.

Adding some spin to its earnings report, as CEOs are prone to do, Jha said that things are looking up for Motorola going forward. Jah highlighted that the number of Honeycomb optimized apps continues to grow, which, of course, would be reassuring if people was actually buying the damn thing in significant numbers.

While the Motorola Xoom might have been the first tablet to “challenge” Apple, Jah explains that being first to market has some downside such as having “less time to cost optimize.”

A company rushing a product to market to take on an established Apple product?! Why that’s unheard of I tell you.