Motorola Xoom 4G LTE Upgrade Starts Tomorrow — Finally

The Motorola Xoom launched earlier this year with the promise of 4G LTE connectivity soon in the near future. That was back in February of 2011, when we expected a 4G LTE upgrade to be available in about 3 months. Now, 6 months later the Xoom 4G LTE upgrade program is finally here, well it will be tomorrow.

Starting on September 29th, you can begin the process of bringing 10 X the connectivity speeds to your Xoom. As we expected back in March, the upgrade itself will be a hassle. You will need to back up all of your content to a computer (Windows or Mac) and send your Xoom in to be upgraded. This process will take approximately six business days from the time you hand your Xoom off to the Fedex or UPS guy.

The good news is that the entire upgrade process is free of charge. You just need to sign up for the upgrade at Verizon Wireless. Form there, you will receive an email with further instructions and shipping information.

Before you send the Xoom back to be upgraded, you should backup your device using the following instructions (pdf) and wipe your device so that no one has access to your documents, photos and email accounts.

If you have not yet purchased the Xoom, you can purchase a Xoom with 4G LTE connectivity from Verizon on October 13th, for $499.

The Xoom 4G LTE has the following specs,

• 10.1-inch widescreen HD display
• 32 GB built-in storage (actual formatted capacity is less), with microSD card slot supporting additional 32 GB
• Android™ 3.2 Honeycomb – supports Google™ Mobile Services including Gmail™, YouTube™, Google Talk™, Google Search™, Google Maps™, Google Movies™, Google Books™ and Android Market™
• Dual-core 1 GHz processor
• Adobe® Flash® 10- enabling the delivery of rich Flash based web content including videos, casual games and applications
• 2-megapixel front-facing camera for video chats over 4G LTE, 3G and WiFi
• 5-megapixel rear-facing camera with LED flash

If you already have the Xoom, this upgrade is definitely worth it for those with 4G LTE coverage. You will see download speeds of 5 to 12 Mbps and upload speeds of 2-5Mbps, and you don’t need to change your existing data plan.

You can read the first part of our Xoom review here , the second part here and the third part of the review here