The Motorola Xoom tablet has been around for a fair bit of time. In fact, it was the first Android tablet to be shipped with the tablet oriented Honeycomb operating system.
It may be a bit long in the tooth now, as 18 months is a lifetime (given the rate at which Android device specs get outdated). In fact, it had a successor within a year of its launch – the Motorola Xoom 2 (or Xyboard, as Verizon chose to label it).
Unlike a lot of other manufacturers, Motorola hasn’t left the owners of its first tablet in the lurch. It has started phasing in Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) updates to LTE based carrier specific Xooms such as the one from Verizon from today (June 4). This is in addition to the ICS updates that were rolled out to WiFi versions of the Xoom tablet over the last couple of weeks.
The ICS update to the Verizon Motorola Xoom makes it the first 4G LTE Android tablet to receive an update to the much vaunted new version of Android. Ice Cream Sandwich brings in the massive performance boost that has become synonymous with its name. There will be a full featured photo editor in the Xoom as well from now on, along with the easy swipe to dismiss method of removing notifications introduced by Google in ICS.
The speech to text feature is far more functional as well now, compared to the poor offerings in Gingerbread and Honeycomb. There’s the somewhat gimmicky face to unlock feature thrown in as well – not the most secure way of unlocking your phone, but a cool party trick nonetheless.
You can get Ice Cream Sandwich on your Verizon Motorola Xoom with the help of an OTA update that’s marginally over 100 MB in size. With the expected performance enhancements in store for your tablet, you should get it right away!
[via TG Daily]
