Deal: 32GB Motorola Xoom 3G/Wi-Fi Tablet – $179.99

Until the remaining stocks last, the Motorola Xoom Wi-Fi/3G Android tablet is available from outlet deal site Ben’s Outlet  for $179.99 with free shipping, with the model on offer being the 32GB version. The tablet being slashed so heavily from its peak now makes it the best deal ever as even though the tablet is officially discontinued by Verizon and even delisted from official Android source support, Motorola has seen fit to develop a Jelly Bean 4.1 update for all of the Verizon-branded tablets, which Verizon has approved and is preparing to roll out within the month after the Wi-Fi only version has had the Jelly Bean update for over a year.

For those that don’t remember, the Xoom shipped with Android Honeycomb, which started the first major split between Android versions in terms of support and functionality, and eventually forced Google to merge Honeycomb’s features into Android itself, leading to Ice Cream Sandwich, a process that did not come without issues. Honeycomb was also the first version of Android which Google actively sought to halt enthusiast activity in terms of porting and modding due to the lack of telephony support and other necessary functionality by deliberately holding back source releases in order to discourage such activity. While the lack of official source did not deter the enthusiast community from ROM development, it did force the community to get more creative with development, which actually worked to its overall benefit.