Hasta La Gadget!

Oh yes, the world’s first Android Honeycomb tablet really is here now. As Verizon announced earlier, you can snag a Motorola Xoom for $599.99 with a two-year contract, or splash out $799.99 for just the LTE-ready device. Alas, the WiFi-only version is nowhere to be seen just yet, but maybe some will show up in the stores later if not tomorrow, so hold on to your personal hotspot devices and keep believing. Either way, in case you’re still indecisive over this 10-inch goodness, maybe our review will help.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Update: Verizon’s been in touch to inform us of a policy change: customers who purchase the off-contract Xoom will now no longer need to be on a month to month plan. That said, we still see “Month to Month” as a compulsory option at the time of updating this post.

Motorola Xoom now available for purchase straight from Verizon, no data activation required (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Feb 2011 23:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Though it really came to a head with the recently-launched Inspire 4G, users have noticed that there really aren’t many phones in AT&T’s stable that deliver stellar upload speeds — the Atrix 4G is suffering the same sub-megabit performance, as are older devices that should seemingly support HSUPA like the Samsung Captivate.

We’ve chatted in the past few days with a source who offers an interesting explanation: AT&T currently requires that all handsets that it sells “handshake” with the network as 3GPP Release 5 devices, the last official set of 3G specifications that lacked support for HSUPA. That feature — also known as EDCH, or FDD Enhanced Uplink — was added in Release 6. Though AT&T is apparently working on permitting the bulk of its handsets to handshake Release 6, presently only the iPhone 4 (and presumably all of its recent data devices like USB modems, which may also use Release 7) are allowed. Neither we, nor our source, know why this is. Our source believes that the Release 6 certification may happen within a “month or two,” which would explain why some AT&T sales reps in live HSPA+ areas are telling customers that the “4G network” isn’t live yet.

You can form your own conclusions as to why AT&T might be imposing this arbitrary limitation, but we do know that “enhanced” backhaul figures prominently into the company’s 4G story; there may be concerns that flipping on HSUPA for everyone right now would overwhelm its legacy infrastructure. At any rate, it sounds like this could all be solved soon through a combination of network changes and possibly firmware updates for individual devices, so let’s keep our fingers crossed.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

AT&T’s brewing HSUPA-gate: the inside story originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Feb 2011 14:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Pretty much everything coming out of Moto these days is saddled with a tightly-locked bootloader paired with one tamper-resistant scheme or another, making custom kernels — the lifeblood of the phone hacking community — tricky at best, nigh impossible at worst. Of course, there was a glimmer of hope last month when the company said that it was working on a solution that’d cater to the developer community, and it looks like the Xoom might be bearing some of that fruit: the bootloader can be unlocked and relocked at will. Now, we’re thinking that Moto might’ve loosened the reigns a bit here simply because the Xoom is running a completely bone-stock build of Android and, as Honeycomb’s launch device, Google might be showing some influence behind the scenes (the Nexus One and Nexus S both have unlockable bootloaders, for instance)… but it’s a good sign.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Motorola bucks its own trend, leaves Xoom bootloader unlockable originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Feb 2011 17:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We found out yesterday that Motorola’s Xoom would be shipping sans Flash support on Verizon Wireless, and while Big Red claimed that an update would be doled out this spring, the folks at Adobe are pointing to a far more specific time frame. In a new post over at the Flash Platform Blog, Adobe has confirmed that “Flash Player 10.2 [will be] pre-installed on some tablets and as an OTA download on others within a few weeks of Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) devices becoming available, the first of which is expected to be the Motorola Xoom.” We’re guessing that the company’s going public with a statement like this to fend off fears that the Xoom may be waiting an eternity for Flash, in essence removing a bit of fear from hesitant early adopters. Either way, it’s excellent news for those eying a Honeycomb tablet of any flavor, and we’re going to take the liberty of taking “a few weeks” to mean “a fortnight.” Cool, Adobe?

Adobe promises Flash Player 10.2 for Honeycomb tablets ‘in a few weeks,’ Xoom gets namechecked originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Feb 2011 15:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Saying that the Motorola Atrix is the best Android phone isn’t a big deal; that throne gets usurped every few months. But even though the Atrix’s accompanying laptop dock is slow and and expensive, the idea behind it is one of the first innovations in mobile technology in quite a while. More »