Motorola pushes for 1M Xoom Android tablet shipments in first quarter

The tablet war is heating up. Fresh from revealing its Xoom tablet at CES, Motorola has ordered 700,000 to 800,000 units for the first quarter of 2011, as reported by DigiTimes today.

According to the report, this could mean Motorola anticipates orders up to one million units in the quarter. Now that Apple has cemented the category of the tablet devices with its wildly popular iPad, other manufacturers have been busy coming up with their own devices for that niche.

Motorola’s Xoom is an Android 3.0 device, a 10.1-inch tablet that runs on Verizon’s 4G LTE network. The Xoom looks pretty slick, and it has a few hardware features that the iPad doesn’t have, such as front and rear-facing cameras, and HDMI and USB ports.

While the prospect of shipping one million Xooms may seem like a lot of shifted units, the figure does not pose a threat to the iPad, which sold one million units in 28 days. There are estimates that Apple has shipped as many as 14.5 million iPads in 2010–selling 90 percent of those–and will surely continue dominating the tablet category as the company is coming out with the iPad 2 this year. But tablets in general are selling like hotcakes: Forrester Research has already revised its estimate for total tablet sales in the US for 2010, raising the figure from 3.5 million to 10.7 million.

This year, Forrester expects tablet sales to hit 24.1 million units in the US. For now, it seems like most of those will be iPads, but Android-powered devices are going to give Apple a run for its money.