Motorola Xoom Ice Cream Sandwich Upgrade Update:
Do you own a WiFi Motorola Xoom?
If so you will be pleased to know that you will be getting your Ice Cream Sandwich update OTA (over the air) soon.
According to the Mobile Indian, it appears that Motorola have been testing the ICS update on the Xoom tablet and will now offer the newer Google signed Android Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0.3 version to US consumers over the next weekend.
Developers on the XDA forums have been testing the original Ice Cream Sandwich update for the Xoom WiFi version and Google have apparently now signed off what they believe to a be an update worthy of release for this particular model. The assumption here is that Motorola are now going to be happy to release this update OTA now it has been tested fully.
Motorola send out confirmation email:
With Motorola sending out confirmation emails to testers stating that an OTA update will arrive soon, they also stated that because the Xoom tablet was a “Google Experience Device” meaning that it was without areas such as a user interface like Touchwiz designed by Samsung, and Motorola needed Google to help test the device this would cause some additional delays.
The new email comes after Motorola sent this email earlier last week:
“Thanks for your patience as we’ve waited for this project to begin. Because we are dealing with a Google Experience Device (GED) we have less insight to timing than we would usually have.However, I’m happy to announce that we will start the update this evening. Because it was delayed a few days, we will also have additional time to test; we will let it run through the weekend.”
The current release schedule is quite categorically only for the WiFi only device owners, and not for 3G/LTE Xoom owners who will have to wait while their device gets rigorous testing from Google and Motorola and their community of testers.
Flash update possible but tricky:
There are ways of updating to Android 4.0.3 from XDA devs and a basic way of doing this here, but the method will require certain cables and a 1-2 GB flash drive.
With Google halting the Samsung Galaxy Nexus S Ice Cream Sandwich Update due to technical problems, this method may be the road they choose to go down for future release updates, where they test the update on a community of people in the know and slowly get it approved for various devices before it gets a full release and potentially causes a whole host of problems like what happened with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus S ICS update.
Let us know if this all holds true please!
Anthony Munns