Ice Cream Sandwich is finally providing some flavor to Motorola Xoom tablets.
A Motorola representative confirmed to CNET today that the company has deployed the Ice Cream Sandwich update, aka Android 4.0, to a small number of Xoom users for testing. The company has promised to confirm additional details when the upgrade is more broadly available, added the rep.
Motorola initially seems to have teased the update, without specifically mentioning ICS, in the following e-mail sent to select Xoom owners yesterday, according to tech blogging site AndroidCentral:
Thanks for your patience as we've waited for this project to begin. Because we are dealing with a Google Experience Device (GED) we have less insight to timing than we would usually have. However, I'm happy to announce that we will start the update this evening. Because it was delayed a few days, we will also have additional time to test; we will let it run through the weekend.
For now, only a few thousand select Xoom Wi-Fi owners will receive the update as part of the initial and private test, explained fellow blogging site Talk Android. But if all goes well, Motorola said, it will deploy ICS to users of its tablet en masse.
Motorola's decision to light a fire under Ice Cream Sandwich follows a move by Asus to update its Transformer Prime to the latest edition of Android. Earlier this month, Asus announced that it would send out ICS to Prime users as of yesterday.
A representative for Asus told CNET that the ICS update for the Transformer Prime rolled out to the U.S. and Taiwan Tuesday night, ahead of schedule. But the update for the original Transformer tablet will roll out in early February for both countries.
Updated 7:30 a.m. PT and again at 1:45 p.m. with information from Asus and Motorola.