If you’re the new owner of a Motorola Xoom, and you want to get your hack on, we suggest you wait it out for a while. According to Motorola’s support forums, if you choose to root (hack) your Xoom, it will no longer be eligible for the free 4G LTE upgrade it has coming to it.
While we’re not surprised that Motorola would pull something like this, we can imagine waiting to root the device will be worth it. How a mere software modification could affect a hardware upgrade is beyond us, but Motorola can do whatever they want. That said, we’re not sure just how much digging Moto will do to try to find out if you’re rooted or not.
It’s not all bad, though. Since the Xoom is unlockable, all you’ll need to do is flash back to the shipping ROM and relock your bootloader. This is the only way you’ll be able to receive OTA updates, and after you have sent your tablet in and have it upgraded, you can do whatever you’d like to with it from there. We know that Motorola is notorious for making their devices hard to hack in some aspects, but it’s not as big of an issue when it comes to the Xoom.
Currently, the original shipping ROM isn’t available officially from Motorola, but one could theoretically make a backup of the original software, and reflash it when the time comes. This is less of an issue than some are making it out to be, and for the most part, it’s a standard affair. If you’re rooted, you shouldn’t receive OTA updates, and if you do, it’ll just take your root access away. This is nothing new, and users have been dealing with this for some time. However, since the Xoom has a hardware upgrade on the horizon, it’ll be best to just do what Moto says. This time.
So, readers, are you going to wait to root your Xoom until after it gets the 4G upgrade from Verizon? Or will you throw caution to the wind and hack the Honeycomb tablet for all it’s worth?
[Via: MotorolaSupportForum]