Motorola's XOOM tablet is going to be the first Android 3.0 tablet around, but if Moto has their way, the XOOM may not always offer a stock Honeycomb experience. Jonathan Nattrass, Motorola's head of Android product management for Europe, recently told Crave UK that the company would like to load its MOTOBLUR interface onto the XOOM. The interesting part, though, is that Nattrass said that the skin will come to the XOOM as an over the air update. There's no word on whether or not MOTOBLUR will be tweaked to better fit a tablet's larger display.
This news comes from the UK branch of Motorola, so it's tough to tell if the plans to skin the XOOM extend to the U.S. Still, it would make for an interesting decision, especially if Moto decided to launch the XOOM with vanilla Honeycomb and then skin it later on. I have a feeling that Moto and Verizon will leave the XOOM skin-less here in the U.S., but you never know. If the two companies do decide to go through with the decision to include MOTOBLUR, I would hope that they would make the change optional for those of us that prefer a more stock experience. Would any of you pass on the XOOM if it ended up with Motorola's Android skin?
UPDATE: Good news for you vanilla Android fans: not long after this news broke, Motorola has come forward and said that it has "no plans" to stick MOTOBLUR onto their tablet. That doesn't mean we can't have fun and discus what would happen if it did eventually run Moto's skin. Would the inclusion of BLUR turn any of you off of the XOOM, or would the fact that it was running Android 3.0 still be good enough for you?
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