The Motorola Xoom, the very first device to run Google’s tablet version of Android known as Honeycomb, hit store shelves on February 24th of this year. When Verizon announced it, they said that at some point in the future, most likely during the summer, customers will be able to get a free hardware upgrade that adds support for 4G LTE. Such an upgrade will require that you send your Xoom in for modification, and it’ll take up to a week to perform the necessary labor. To say Xoom owners have been impatient with regards to finding out when this free upgrade program would begin would be an understatement. The situation didn’t exactly improve when earlier this week Verizon announced that they’d start shipping Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 with 4G LTE by the end of this month. Anyway, it looks like Big Red has officially started sending Xoom owners an email that says starting this September they can finally get access to what PC Mag calls the fastest wireless network in America.
Here’s our advice: Assuming you have a Xoom, get the upgrade done and then put it up on eBay or Craigslist immediatly. There’s going to be a slew of tablets out on the market by the end of this year that will not only be thinner and more capable, but will also be running later versions of Android. Devices that have Android Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) on board, the version of Android that will finally bridge the gap between smartphones and tablets, are set to hit in Q4. We don’t know much about the new OS, but there are rumors that it’ll add support for insanely high resolution screens, we’re talking way more pixels than even the latest batch of HDTVs.
But hey, if you have a Xoom and you’re happy … you’re weird.