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Android 3.2 rolling out on Xoom, Motorola says

Android 3.2 is launching on the Motorola Xoom. A couple of marquee improvements include a new zoom mode and support for long-dormant hardware. The new version of Honeycomb will also come to other tablets in the near future.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
Brooke Crothers
Motorola is now rolling out Android Honeycomb 3.2 for its Xoom tablet.
Motorola is now rolling out Android Honeycomb 3.2 for its Xoom tablet. Motorola

Motorola is beginning to roll out Android Honeycomb 3.2 for its Xoom tablet. The Google update includes a couple of key enhancements that will also roll out to other Android tablets in the near future.

"Google has started rolling out Android 3.2, in phases, to Motorola Xoom users," a Motorola representative confirmed for CNET today.

The update will introduce a new viewing mode, referred to as "zoom to fill," and fully enable SD card slots. Motorola will be the first tablet vendor to get this update, according to Richard Shim, an analyst at DisplaySearch.

"Imagine viewing your app at the size of a phone screen then zooming in about 200 percent," says the Android Developers blog. Stretch-to-fill is the standard layout resizing, while zoom-to-fill screen is the new screen compatibility mode, according to the blog.

The new zoom-to-fill option for Android Honeycomb.
The new zoom-to-fill option for Android Honeycomb. Android Developers Blog

Other improvements include optimizations for 7-inch designs, such as Huawei's 7-inch MediaPad, and support for Qualcomm chips--not just those from Nvidia, which have been the standard so far for tablets like the Xoom, Acer's Iconia Tab 500, Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1, and Toshiba's Thrive. Huawei's tablet, for instance, uses a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.

A bunch of other tweaks and improvements are also expected, which may include performance optimizations, according to reports.

In related news, refurbished Xooms (32GB, Wi-Fi) are now being offered for $399.