Droid Bionic 4G aimed for August: report

The Droid Bionic, successor to the Droid and the Droid X, looks to be locked for launch.
Or mostly locked: The good folks over at This Is My Next have published a Best Buy promo advertisement featuring the Bionic. The ad seems real enough, although the poster is missing the precise launch dates and a

spec lists. What we can tell from the advert is that the Bionic is aesthetic: a face-lift, some nipping and tucking, and some rounding around the corners.
In fact, if you just glance at the Bionic, you could be forgiven for confusing the thing for an iPhone 4. It seems identical, except the Apple home button has been swapped with the familiar Droid button array. "Control it, and you control everything," reads the Best Buy promo copy. "With the ferocious force of Verizon 4G LTE, the Droid Bionic is an all-powerful, unstoppable machine."
Among the other additions promised in the advertisement: video chat functionality, a beefed-up dual core processor, and the ability to wirelessly pull files from your hard drive. Of course, as This Is My Next points out, the Droid Bionic has been promised before, and just as quickly yanked away from the spotlight. After taking the wraps off the device at CES in January, in April Verizon announced production on the Bionic would be delayed until this summer.
At the time, Verizon said only that it was "incorporating several enhancements to make this an even better consumer experience."
So when, exactly, will the Droid Bionic launch? Well, the tech rumors site Android Central is pointing to an August 4 release date, which lines up with the early Verizon statement. More when we know it.

Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" Best Buy Party

Pushing her non-stop promotional efforts into the night, Lady Gaga turned up for an appearance at a Best Buy store in New York City on Monday night (May 23).

Scantily clad in a an all-black bondage inspired ensemble, the "Judas" singer was on-hand for the launch of her new album, Born This Way, which was released worldwide earlier in the day.

As for how Gaga managed to record new music for the album all the while being constantly touring on the road, "American Idol" host Ryan Seacrest revealed the answer on his radio show earlier today.

"She recorded most of the album in a studio — on wheels," Seacrest explained. "After her shows she’d hop into a converted bus, that had a studio in it, and record tracks all night as they rolled down the highway to her next stop, and then early in the morning, they’d pull over and she’d get out of that converted bus and onto her sleeping bus and rest as much as she could until rolling into another city for another show.”

IPad 2 Shortage Gives XOOM an Opening

Motorola Mobility Holdings lined up notably strong U.S. distribution for the launch of the XOOM WiFi.

Amazon.com (ticker: AMZN), Best Buy (BBY), Costco Wholesale (COST), RadioShack (RSH), Sam's Club, Staples (SPLS) and Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) form an unusually broad launch pad for the tablet. The price is set at $599, though we expect several of the retailers to debut the device with promotional pricing around $550.

Motorola (MMI) is now set to launch its WiFi-only tablet two weeks before Research in Motion (RIMM) gets its similar, though smaller Playbook device out, likely close to the $500 retail price point. The notably cheaper price of the WiFi version compared to its 3G sibling is, in our view, likely to help sales.

The current [ Apple (AAPL)] iPad 2 shortage, combined with exceptionally broad distribution of the XOOM WiFi, gives Motorola a good opening, in our view. We expect the sales of Xoom WiFi to be boosted by what we view as a surprisingly thin early supply of iPad 2.

In our view, Apple left a lot of money on the table when it could not deliver sufficient launch volumes for its new tablet. The wait time for the iPad 2 is now up to five weeks at Apple.com. Our research indicates that the reported recent chilling of the Apple-Samsung relationship can probably be traced to Samsung's challenges in getting the new A5 processor ramped up fast enough to meet Apple's demands.

We now expect Motorola to comfortably beat our 400,000-unit XOOM projection for first-quarter 2011. Some extra volumes are likely to come from what seems like a robust series of European XOOM distribution deals. We expect XOOM to be launched by the British electronics powerhouses Dixon's and Carphone Warehouse in the U.K. in early April.

Motorola is likely to ship some XOOM units to Europe and Asia during the last two weeks of first-quarter 2011. We believe Dixon's, Carphone Warehouse and [Deutsche Telekom's] T-Mobile in Germany are all committing to relatively strong marketing support for the XOOM. Our research indicates European distributors and operators are worried about Apple getting a stranglehold of the tablet market and are set to promote [ Google (GOOG)] Android alternatives strongly this spring. Motorola is in a good position here, in our view, because the Honeycomb tablet launches of vendors like LG and HTC seem to be somewhat delayed from original launch targets.

We believe several recent store checks indicating tepid sales of Motorola Atrix phone at AT&T (T) are misleading. Amazon is undercutting AT&T notably on Atrix pricing, at $130 versus $200. A similar situation took place last autumn during the Blackberry Torch launch -- the meaningfully lower Amazon.com price drove consumers to buying the Torch from the Web retailer, triggering a series of misleading store checks that underestimated national Torch sales substantially. This in turn created the backdrop for Research in Motion's revenue and earnings-per-share surprises for the autumn quarter.

We believe 50%-70% of sales of some new models now take place at Web retailers, particularly when there is a notable price gap between Web retailers and traditional stores.

We believe Motorola is on track to sell 500,000 units of the Atrix during first-quarter 2011, beating our original expectations somewhat. The delay of the HTC Thunderbolt launch at Verizon Wireless [a joint venture of Verizon Communications (VZ) and Vodafone Group (VOD)] has helped a bit, in our view. We expect strong Verizon marketing support for the Motorola Bionic in April as the carrier starts its big LTE marketing push.