Motorola Xoom Gets the Teardown Treatment

No rest for the wicked.

The iFixit team has yet to down tools after what’s turned out to be a monster week in terms of disassemblies. Following hot on the heels of the Motorola Atrix, the Samsung Galaxy S 4G, and the 15-inch MacBook Pro is the Motorola Xoom.

Officially launched earlier this week, the Xoom is the nearly-4G tablet that made such a splash at CES. Packing Nvidia’s Tegra 2 chipset and 32GB of storage, the device is a bit of a beast, and will be even more so once Motorola gets around to upgrading it with 4G support.

If you were keeping an eye out yesterday you’ll know that updating the device for 4G involves sending your tablet in to Motorola for approximately one week. The team at iFixit reports that looking inside the device, it seems as though the tablet was designed with this future upgrade in mind. 

Upgrading the 4G will involve a T5 Torx screwdriver to gain access to the circuit board, and then disconnecting of two antenna connectors, unscrewing the two Torx screws holding the board in place, and swapping it out with an 4G LTE board. It’s not a very involved process and iFixit reckons it’s something that could easily be done by a technician in a Verizon store in under ten minutes. So why you have to send it away for a week is anybody’s guess. 

4G fun aside, the tablet scored a fairly decent eight out of 10 on the repairability scale, losing points for the massive amounts of screws (57!). This $800 (if you’re going for the 4G version) tablet boasts that dual-core Tegra 2 we mentioned before, Toshiba THGBM2G8D8FBA1B NAND Flash, Samsung K4P4G154EC DRAM, Qualcomm MDM6600 supporting HSPA+ speeds of up to 14.4 Mbps, Broadcom BCM4329 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1, and FM Tuner, Hynix H8BCSOQG0MMR 2-chip memory MCP, AKM 8975 Electronic Compass and Texas Instruments 54331 Step Down SWIFT DC/DC Converter with Eco-Mode.

Android Tablets to Get iPad's 'The Daily' in Spring

When the Daily launched earlier this month, it was touted as an iPad-exclusive newspaper that would initially only be available to those who have access to an Apple tablet. Rupert Murdoch made no secret of the fact that the Daily would eventually be available on more than just the iPad but the News Corp boss implied that it would be a long time before it left the iOS platform. However, it seems the exclusivity of the iPad was particularly short-lived.

According to All Things D’s Peter Kafka, the Daily will be coming to Android tablets in the very near future. Citing inside sources, Kafka says the team over at the Daily is prepping for an Android tablet launch for the second quarter of this year.

An 8.9-inch Galaxy Tab Coming Before Summer?

Samsung’s 7-inch Galaxy Tab has already gotten itself an older brother in the form of the not-yet-released 10.1-inch version. However, Samsung’s got another Tab up its sleeve and this one is for the folks that balk at 10-inches but scoff at seven.

Rumored to be hitting sometime this summer, the 8.9-inch Galaxy Tab will sit comfortably between the original 7-inch Tab and the much larger, upcoming 10.1-inch model. Engadget cites Korean Yonhap News Agency in reporting that the 8.9-inch tablet will hit in the first half of 2011. Yonhap News said the device could launch as soon as next month. 

If the news is true (Yonhap says it received the information via phone from a Samsung spokesperson), it would flesh out the Galaxy Tab line very nicely indeed. With the 7-inch Tab sporting a 1GHz Cortex A8 and Froyo, and the 10.1-incher packing Nvidia’s Tegra 2 chipset and Honeycomb, it’ll be interesting to see the specs of this 8.9-inch model. No word on what kind of OS the middle-child Tab will be running, but we assume it will be Honeycomb and that the specs will be a little closer to that of the 10.1-inch Tab.

IE9 To Launch On March 14

We are a bit speculating here, but we have a very good reason to believe that Microsoft's new browser will launch during festivities held at SXSW on March 14.

We are a bit speculating here, but we have a very good reason to believe that Microsoft's new browser will launch during festivities held at SXSW on March 14.

Series6 PowerVR GPU Promises Up to 100x Boost

Yowza!

Gaming on smartphones is becoming increasingly popular thanks to improvements in the mobile CPU and GPU sector. While five years ago we would have stared, mouths agape, at what phones can handle today, they still don’t come close to what you can get with desktop graphics. However, Imagine Technologies says it's going to change all that.