Xoom updates - The good news and the bad

There has been a flurry of updates some confirmed and others a bit pre-mature. If you look above it was rumored we would be getting an update starting yesterday. While I believe this is real I have not seen it as of yet. Insiders says was it was pulled for some technical reason but will be out shortly. Now the BAD news. The LTE/4G upgrade has been pushed off for a few months. We won't be seeing it until summer according to Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha.

Flash was updated and is supposed to make better use of your video card so it you have not hit the app market in the last day or two you will want to update.

For those looking to annoy their Apple lover friends you can remind them that there is, already, more FREE apps that run on your Android OS than do on iOS.


Motorola sells over 250,000 Xooms. NOT 25,000. Haters. I am not sure why the iPad fan boys care how many Xooms sell but if you feel like knocking their smugness down a peg, the stories of the Xoom being a total failure were a total fabrication. So it was nice to see this story detailing the sales. Now we can be sure we get our fair share of apps and accessories.

One step closer to Facetime with our Apple friends

Qik Video Connect now works with many devices running Android 2.1 and up, iPhones, iPad 2s and any iPod Touch with a camera Apple owners and Android lovers speak face to face over 3G, 4G, and WiFi with the device of their choosing. Now do not get too exited today as the app will just force close on you if you load it on your Xoom but, we are one step closer to being able to video chat with almost anyone on the planet.

I can plug in my Xoom USB and see my SD card

Besides adding a lot of speed to the new kernel the new Tiamat 1.4 adds the ability to mount and show your SD card via USB mass storage (even on my Mac).

• Mass Storage now enabled in Android with easy scripter script. Thanks kcrudup for enable mass_storage_platform_device in board driver.
• Huge source update from tegra upstream. Preparation for the elusive Motorola update we don't even need now!
• Found lost L2 Cache patch. Linpack 65 and Quadrant 3000 out the box.
• Removed more bloat from kernel. Much leaner and meaner.

As I have said before once you are rooted and have installed a ROM manager install is a SNAP! All the gritty details here if you are interested.

New kernel flashed via recovery

If you look above you will see I finally got a "good" backup of the system after moving all my movies and other media to my SD card..

As of today the Tiamat Kernel can now be installed via the recovery manager. I downloaded the new ZIP, placed it on my SD card and clicked install via the menu. Thats it! Done. Ah life is good.



If history is an indicator of the future I can guess I will be loading a new theme via the manager in a day or two... if not sooner.

Edit: O.K. 8 hours later. Here you go. ZIP installable themes

Recovery makes Backups, System Mods, & Theme loads a snap

The day I have been talking about has arrived! For those of you not familiar with loading your hacks and system modifications via the ROM Manager or Quick Boot you will see that hacking your Xoom just got a whole bunch easier. You will now be able to back up your device, in its current configuration, theme it, mod it, change it, and no matter what happens you will have a backup of what you had before. So, if the worst happens, you will be right back to where you started via a system restore. Also you will not be at the adb prompt very often anymore since you will be able to load mods and themes via a ZIP file though menus.

Without thinking I kicked off a backup right away forgetting all the Movies, and MP3's I have loaded on my Xoom so now I have a GIANT backup running to my SD card. (It was early and I was excited) but all is going well. What I need to do before the next "real" backup is move all my large media to the SD card so only the "core" system and apps get backed up.

If you are rooted you download (1) file and installing the mod is just a few commands:

adb reboot bootloader
fastboot flash recovery recovery.img
fastboot reboot

If you would like to load this more information can be found here on XDA. I will have more information after I have had time to play with it a bit more.

Xoom themes in Red, Green, and Blue

BignaDad has an Alpha release of some of the new themes he has been working on and they look good. Now a few of the folks I know have installed tis theme and there has been a few glitches but that why this is an "Alpha" release meaning: Do not install this theme unless you are prepared to restore your tablet if the worst happens. I typically let the "smart" people work these things out.

Again once I think many themers are waiting on a working SD card (supported by Motorola, not the hack) to really start theming and customizing this device but the future is looking bright!

Skype for Android vulnerable to hack

Skype for Android vulnerable to hacking? In simple terms Skype forgot to encrypt the files and enforce permissions on the internal database. The folks over at Android Police built a "proof of concept" app that reads in all the personal information stored in the database maintained by the Skype program. What can you do about it besides NOT run Skype? Not much.

If you are a reader of this blog this go back to what I have talked about a few times. If and when your Android gets hacked it will because of a shortsighted programmer or a flaw left in some monster program like Flash where they find vulnerabilities almost monthly not some rogue program you downloaded off the Market or from some Chinese hacker (not that it can't happen I am talking likelihood of it occuring). Again for this Skype exploit an anti-virus program is NOT going to help you. So please do not think you are covered by the various AV apps out there if the program is "playing by the rules".

I guess this in more of a plea to the Android developers out there to stay vigilant and for you, the user, to stay informed about your device. What makes Android great is also possibly it greatest downfall - The ability to quickly deploy programs and the option to run any program you want by clicking "Allow unknown sources".

Just a reminder I will be out there watching for issues and exploits that could effect your Xoom so if you are on Facebook or Twitter you may want to click ton he buttons over to the right and "Like" the FAQ or add the FAQ as a Twitter friend because the only thing we do here is talk about the Xoom and the apps that run on it

More @ Android Police

My SD card works on my Xoom!

WORKING SD CARD!

If you are rooted this simple upgrade will make your Xooms SD card functional! Thanks @bigrushdog

Display Covers for movies in Android Gallery

One of the biggest annoyances I have with Android is the limited display functionality of the Android Gallery. While it works great in making all your visual media easily accessible, for movies, it generates a random thumbnail image for each video.



The 3D-ish view of Gallery on the Xoom looks cool, but without at least some control over what it actually displays, its functionality is too limited to be of much use for frequent movie-watchers. With 6 Star Wars movies, it basically requires you to either look at the info for each movie (the i at the top right) or to simply test-play each one to figure out which is the one you actually want to watch.

Because Gallery's capability of displaying folders and images as well as thumbnails for movies, it is possible to make Gallery display cover-art (as well as names) for movies:



Here is how to do it:

• You start by organizing your movies on your computer in folders. Put one movie in a folder, and name the folder what you want to be displayed underneath the image in Gallery.
• With all your movies in individual folders, copy the folders over to the "Movies" folder on your Xoom/Android device.
• Now, add the cover image you want to display in Gallery for each movie in the movie folders you added on your Xoom/Android device.

The trick here is that Gallery places the newest files on top. While you can of course add the image files in the movie folders before you copy them over, more than likely some cover images will be copied over before the actual movie is copied, placing a newer time-stamp on the movie. If this happens, the movie will actually appear on top of the cover-image, ruining the look you are trying to achieve. By copying the images afterwards, the image ends up being newer and thus it appears on top.

When all done, your movie folder on the Xoom should be organized like this:



And if we look in one of the folders:



Note that the date/time stamp of the image is a few minutes newer than that of the actual video file. This is why it ends up being displayed on top.

16GB Xoom on the way?

Some fresh Xoom news hit the wire today. According to a tipster for Droid Life, it appears that Verizon is preparing to sell a 16GB Motorola Xoom. With so many lower priced tablets prepared to hit the market this summer, you had to know it was only a matter of time before Motorola broke into this segment. For now, all that seems to be "confirmed" is a 3G/4G variant, hopefully a WiFi variant will hit the market as well.




Photo credit to Droid Life.

This is clearly a solid move by Motorola if everything comes to fruition. As Debian discussed below, there have been numerous reviews complaining how expensive the Xoom is. Valid argument or not, this move should silence the price critics. While no official pricing or release dates have been leaked, I have my fingers crossed for a sub $600 3G/4G Xoom. With some luck, maybe we will see a sub $500 WiFi version? Something close to those wishes would certainly put the Xoom well under the iPad in the storage per dollar category, might even give any Acer and Asus tablets a run for their money. For now though, all we can do is speculate until we see some official news but this is certainly an exciting time in the Xoom world.

WiFi Only Rooting and CPU Overclock

Well, as my first post on this blog, it only seems fitting that I post about one of the first things I did with my WiFi Xoom, rooting.

Bringing my baby home, isn't she beautiful?

Being brand new to Android, I was cautiously excited to unlock the potential of my new toy. I spent tons of time in the first few days of ownership reading anything and everything I could about Android, the Xoom, and rooting. The first day of the WiFi's release, the devs had an adb root release. A few days after that, a one-click root was released. Being new to Android, I was also new to the adb method of communicating with any device, and I was worried. Naturally, I thought the one-click method was going to be the best for me due to my lack of experience. I spent a couple more days reading about the one-click method and realized that the one-click for the WiFi Xoom was not working as expected. At first, I wanted to wait until the one-click method was stable. However, my excitement got the best of me. I really wanted a boot animation and I decided to jump the gun and see what kind of skills I really have.

First things first, setup. I had a pretty good handle on what I needed. I used the links in the threads I read and downloaded SDK and Moto drivers. During install, SDK pushed me to download Java. Once Java was done, SDK continued its install. In my case, SDK installed into Program Files on the C drive, you want to move SDK to the root of the C drive. Then, I located the proper WiFi root files, downloaded them, and moved them to platform-tools in SDK. I used the Tiamat 1.1.6 kernel. With all of the setup out of the way, I was ready to get moving.



SDK on the C: Drive with Windows XP
Like I said, being new to Android, I was full of anxiety. I read and re-read the instructions and watched a video on how to run it all. After working up the courage, I entered Debug mode, connected my Xoom, and typed in the first command line. Then the second, then the third. Boom, unlocked, awesome. At this point, a lot of my worries had been washed away with excitement; everything had gone to plan so far. Then I remembered I cleared all of my data with the first three lines. Unfortunately, this is unavoidable. I am glad I rooted early on, before I had spent hours customizing my home screens and collecting free apps.

Yay for our Debug friend!

After the ups and downs of unlocking and losing all of the stored data, it was time for the real challenge, rooting. I brought the site back up and, one by one, copied the lines of code into the cmd prompt. With every line, I was holding my breath until the cmd prompt was ready for the next input. Being the nervous wreck that I am, I was trying to follow the video at the same time as rooting. Unfortunately for me, my laptop is 6 years old and decided to bog down on me in the middle of rooting process. No effect on the cmd prompt and pushing files, just took a few years off my own life as I continued on. After what seemed like forever, I finally made it to the last line, "adb shell". I took a ginormous breath, typed it in, and hit enter. All the cmd prompt outputted was "#". I had no idea what to expect, I couldn't watch the video, and I didn't read up on what would happen at the end of the process, I was clueless. I made a huge assumption and guessed that it worked, I disconnected my Xoom and looked for Super User. Sure enough, it was there, what a joyous occasion! We have root! Finally my stomach felt like it was back in the correct place.

My Precious!

Since my driving force for rooting was changing the boot animation, that was the very first thing I did. I quickly downloaded a file browser and dropped the new animation into system/media. Shut her down, fired her up, and voila! No more lame honeycomb boot animation. After trying another one, I finally settled on the retro BIOS boot animation.

Big thanks to ihtfp69 over at XDA for the awesome animation.

From there, overclock time. I downloaded the overclock app of my choice and opened it up. For a while I sat there thinking to myself, "Do I really want to OC? Is this safe?". In the end, I didn't overclock that night. After reading more the following day, I came home and took the plunge. I maxed out the overclock at 1.504 GHz and I couldn't be happier. This thing is a beast overclocked and I am very happy I did.


Just slide the bar to the right, could it get any easier?
Over the next few hours I watched my battery temps like a hawk. I knew what they were before overclocking and was expecting to see them climb well above the stock levels. After some thorough abuse from browsing, I was pleasantly surprised to see the temps maxing out in the low to mid 80s F.


Why can't it be that temp outside?

In the end, everything was a whole lot easier than I was expecting. It was a roller coaster for sure but I wouldn't have it any other way. I am very happy that I took the "long" adb route of unlocking and rooting over the one-click method. I now have hands on experience with pushing files and, as far as I am concerned, that is invaluable information. If I have any future issues, I have the knowledge to push the stock files back over and start from the beginning. I highly recommend that anyone considering rooting their Xoom, use the adb method over one-click.

I got a Xoom WiFi'er to help me

Since I do not have a Wifi Xoom myself I have recruited some help. I think you will like him. He is smart, funny, and I made him hack his Xoom and write about it before letting him aboard . You have to have a few standards right? I had to find a person with a Wifi device that had tried and tested anything Wifi related on this website as my goal is to keep this site as accurate as possible. He is also a bit more verbose than I am so I hope you WiFi'er like to read

Please look for post from our resident WiFi'er soon - he goes by the alias of ATP so please lets all give him a warm Welcome!

Why is the Xoom "overpriced" exactly?

I keep seeing a lot of folks out there complaining/whining that the Xoom is "expensive" and "overpriced" when compared to an iPad. Really? Are you comparing Apples to Xooms here?

Amazon has the Xoom Android Tablet (Wi-Fi) version for $589 the iPad that is nearest to the Xoom in features is an Apple iPad2 (32GB, Wifi) version for $589 it looks to me to be about the same price!

Now if you buy an iPad 2 today sure you get all the applications available but you also get all of the following:

• No USB connectivity
• No HDMI (without a $38 dollar iPad HDMI adapter)
• No 1080p output
• No SD card (No expandability)
• A lower resolution screen (132 ppi vs 160 ppi)
• No customizability (try and load an alternate keyboard on your iPad )
• No Flash

I do not hate the iPad and if you want all the apps today please buy one but, Apples to Apples the Xoom is about the same price. Some might argue actually cheaper than the iPad given the features. Would it have been nice is Motorola made a 16GB WiFi only version for $499? Yes, but they didn't.

The Xoom is DEAD, FINISHED, OVER!

Good grief people give it a rest!

I remember back in 2001 when everyone told me I was "nuts" for switching off of Windows and going to the new Mac OS. "Apple is going out of business", they proclaimed. Lord knows how many stories and retweets I saw that today that said something to the affect of "Only 100,000 Xooms sold" Smug iPad owners gleefully asking for retractions on "Xoom is iPads serious competition" stories. My, my, my how short our memories are. Need an example: Top 5 reason the iPad will Fail - Jan 2010 Hell, it was only a year or so ago when the iPad came out and people mocked it was nothing more than a giant iPhone. In fact... it was just a bigger iPhone and that is the difference.

To Apples credit when the iPad came out it ran, for the most part, flawlessly on iOS. Why? Apple had the foresight to know they were going to roll out a product on a larger display that would need new options and screen sizing that was over and beyond what an iPhone could do. So when the iPad was actually deployed it was relatively easy for developers to recode their apps and push it to the new device. OS already debugged and tested. Done!

Enter Honeycomb. Unfortunately, the fact is all other Android tablets before the Xoom were literally phone apps running on a bigger screen. Android 2.x is a phone OS that runs over 90% of the Android devices out there but, has no "real" tablet support in it. Googles answer to the missing tablet OS? Honeycomb - Android 3.0. The first victim? The Xoom. The Xoom and Honeycomb released days apart and that was not a good idea in my opinion. I say "victim" because I would bet money that even Google knows they released the OS way too early. As of today everyone is still waiting on my SD card functionality, and I am sure Google knows it was a oversight not having more applications ready for the tablet. If Google does not think it was a mistake I am sure Motorola does.

Does it matter as a Xoom owner? NO. Not really. I mean sure if I owned Moto or Google stock I might be kind of pissed off right now but as a user? No. The difference between the iOS and the Honeycomb is simple. Xoom is not the only Android tablet in the pipe. LG, Samsung, and countless other are rolling out their own "Honeycomb tablet" and EVERY SINGLE APPLICATION made for any one of those tablets will run on your Xoom. As an added bonus, if Google treats the Xoom like they handle the first Android phone to market (Nexus One) You can expect to see OS upgrades for the Xoom available before any other device sees them.

As for the haters let them hate. No OS upgrades to the iPad are going to give them: USB connectivity, an SD card, full HDMI mirroring that at does not require a special $40 cable, Flash, 1080p, widescreen, or a higher resolution than the Xoom.

Does the latest version of the phone OS work on the very first Android phone? Yes, it does! Two years down the road I bet we will be loading the latest greatest Android Tablet OS on our Xooms with 20,000+ apps available in the Android Market wondering if we should get that new Quad Core Xoom.

HD boot animations added

Red and Blue HD animations added to Boot Animations page

Cheap way to take care of Fingerprints

I posted this on Twitter on April first and a few folks thought I was joking but I am 100% serious. Using Rain-X Original Glass Treatment on your Xoom will cut your fingerprints and smears down a bunch. Will it "get rid of" a tablet screen with grimy fingerprints all over it? NO, but it will cut down on them a lot. I was more impressed how it cleaned up my Droid X. Not sure if it is because it just has a smaller screen but I HIGHLY recommend doing this if you do not have a screen protector on your Xoom and other devices.

As a side note: I swear by this stuff on my vehicle glass. When most people are driving around with their wipers on full blast I still have mine on intermittent.