Motorola Droid Xyboard Ice Cream Sandwich Update Now Available

The Motorola Droid Xyboard Ice Cream Sandwich update is now available to owners of both the Droid Xyboard 8.2 and the Droid Xyboard 10.1

The Droid Xyboard Ice Cream Sandwich update has been confirmed by Motorola, courtesy of DroidDog, and it should be available to owners of the Xoom sequels, Over-the-Air, right now.

Owners will want to go into their device settings and check to see if the update is available. If it is, and it should be, the device will show a download prompt and once the software is downloaded, it will then install on the device bringing with it, a host of new features and improvements.

Read: Droid XYBOARD 10.1 Review (Video).

The update will take owners to Android 4.0.4, a vast improvement over the previous version of Xyboard Android software. Motorola has detailed many of the new features coming on board with Ice Cream Sandwich and those include:

Enhancements:

• Updated Browser with faster rendering, zoom and pan: Users can also now save pages for offline reading and request desktop versions of websites.
• Swipe to dismiss notifications and recent apps: You can now dismiss individual notifications and apps from the Recent Apps list with a simple swipe of a finger.
• Redesigned app launcher: In All Apps launcher, you can now simply drag an app to get information about it, immediately uninstall it, or disable a pre-installed app.
• New System Font for Improved Readability: An entirely new typeface (called Roboto) optimized for high resolution screens improves readability and brings a polished feel to the user interface.
• Updated “People” Application: Replaces contacts and integrates seamlessly with Google+ and other social networks.
• Improved text input and spell-checking: The keyboard now features improved accuracy to make text input faster. It also now includes an in-line spell checker to make corrections easier.
• Type with your voice: Now you can simply touch the microphone on the keyboard and start talking to write emails, or any other text—more than 20 languages supported. Text appears in real time, so there’s no waiting for server processing.
• Richer and versatile imaging capabilities: For new flexibility and convenience while shooting video, you can now take snapshots at full video resolution just by tapping the screen as video continues to record. For capturing larger scenes, the camera introduces a single motion panorama mode. You can also launch camera directly from the Lockscreen. When you shoot videos, you can now choose from a number of silly faces and other fun effects which recognize individual facial features so you can give your friends big eyes, squeeze heads, make noses bigger, or change the scenery with background replacement.
• Redesigned Gallery app with photo editor: To help pictures look their best, the Gallery now offers a powerful photo editor so you can crop and rotate pictures, set levels, remove red eyes, add effects, and much more.
• Richer, resizable widgets: You can expand widgets to show more content, or shrink them to save space.
• Quicker screen rotation
• A new setting to choose whether the power button immediately locks the device or not: shows up only when you have a pattern, PIN or password lock, it then lets you set a timer for how long it takes to lock after pressing the sleep button.
• Microsoft Exchange improvements with additional EAS policies
• Improved stability
• Face Unlock: Face Unlock is a new screen-lock option that lets you unlock your device with your face. It takes advantage of the device front-facing camera and state-of-the-art facial recognition technology to register a face during setup and then to recognize it again when unlocking the device. Just hold your device in front of your face to unlock, or use back up PIN or pattern.

There should also be a number of bug fixes coming along with the software as well, which should help to squash some of the bugs that owners have been seeing.

Keep in mind, these updates are for the Wi-Fi only models of the Droid Xyboard. Those who own the Verizon 4G LTE versions will have to wait for the updates to arrive.

Motorola and Verizon still have not yet given a specific release date for those updates.

The Motorola Droid Xyboard is the follow-up to the original Motorola Xoom and while they are pretty solid devices, they did not see to attract a large user base.