US device maker Motorola has just announced that users of its Xoom tablets in Asia Pacific (including India) will be eligible for a free update of their operating system from Android 3 to Android 3.1 from tomorrow onwards.
The update, the first major update to the tablet oriented Android Honeycomb edition, will resolve many pain points for the users, as well as introduce a few nifty features as well.
One of the biggest visual changes, after installing the 40 MB update file, will be that the home screen will now show small boxes of all the running applications, making it easier for users to switch from one to the other.
In other words, to move from the web-browser to the photo-gallery would now take only two clicks — one to go back to the home screen, and the second one on the photo-gallery box, assuming that it was already running.
The announcement has come a day after Verizon announced the availability of the Samsung Galaxy tab 10.1 on its LTE network. The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is the biggest competitor that Xoom faces and already comes with Android 3.1.
The update will also increase the capacity of the SD cards (memory cards) supported by Xoom to 32 GB, taking the total possible memory on board to 64 GB.
After the update, users will also be able to connect and use both a bluetooth keyboard as well as a bluetooth mouse at the same time. It will also enable support for most of the joysticks and gamepads manufactured for PC games, add built-in Flash Player support (for youtube-like sites) and allow the WiFi to be ‘on’ even when the screen is turned off.
The update can be downloaded by connecting the Xoom to a WiFi network, to avoid costly data charges on the cell-phone networks.
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