Motorola Xoom available for pre-order in PC World, Currys and Dixons

The hotly anticipated Motorola Xoom tablet is now available for pre-order for £499.99 in a Wi-Fi only version at Currys, PC World and Dixons ahead of a release in the first week of April.

The Xoom was demonstrated at CES in January, and is set to be one of the first tablets to ship with Google's Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system.

It is also one of the first tablets to sport a dual-core processor, in this case Nvidia's Tegra 2, and comes with 1GB DDR2 RAM and 32GB of storage.

Other features include a 10.1in HD widescreen display, a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera, support for 1080p HD video and video calling over Wi-Fi, 3G and 4G, and a 1,280 x 800 display.

Dixons said that the Motorola Xoom will also be available online at another of its sites, Pixmania, but the site is not currently displaying any results for the Xoom.

Question marks remain over whether the Xoom will ship with Flash support, given that in the US it failed to do so.

Pricing and availability of the 3G version of the Xoom are also officially unknown, despite the rumour mill working overtime.

The 10.1in Xoom could soon be joined by a 7in version, Motorola Mobility chief executive Sanjay Jha told attendees at a Morgan Stanley conference earlier this week.