The first official Android 3.0 (Honeycomb)-powered tablet is available right now with a hefty price tag in tow, and while the debate about whether or not the Motorola XOOM will be able to take the title of tablet king from the iPad is still going on in coffee shops across the nation, there’s still some people out there scratching their heads about that whole 4G upgrade plan that Verizon has planned for the tablet. When it was first announced, customers were just going to have to bring their tablet into a Verizon store and someone would take care of the upgrade for them. That’s not the case anymore, and it’s beginning to sound like Verizon and Motorola should be ready for some major feedback (of the negative kind) when the upgrade process starts rolling along.
As of right now, Verizon’s 4G upgrade plan means you, the recent purchaser of the XOOM tablet, will have to send your new tablet into Motorola and be away from it for up to six days. That’s almost a week! In that time, someone there at Motorola will be upgrading your tablet to connect to Verizon’s LTE network.
The problem comes in the recent teardown from iFixit, and the fact they revealed that it’s a pretty simple, if not ridiculously simple, process to add 4G connectivity to the XOOM. According to them, it would take a seasoned technician only ten minutes to make the necessary changes to the tablet. And, if you happened to find a donkey wandering around, they suggest that even the work animal could manage the fixes in a couple of hours.
It may not sound like an issue, but if “everyone” starts hearing how “easy” it is to add 4G to the tablet, then people are going to start asking why they have to send it into Motorola. Furthermore, why it’s going to take almost a week to get the changes. The truth is, this is something that Verizon should have made sure didn’t happen. They needed to put technicians in Verizon stores and have them ready to make the changes, so customers could walk in and have 4G when they walked out.
But, instead, Verizon and Motorola should now be getting ready for when things go wrong. And come on, something is going to go wrong. And it is more than likely going to be something huge. Like a technician going through someone’s tablet and their personal things. Or someone’s tablet getting completely wiped. Or someone’s tablet just coming back broken in some fashion or another.
Let me know what you think in the comments below. Do you think this will be a major storm for Verizon and Motorola, or just one of the companies in particular, when the time comes? Or do you believe it can all go down without a hitch?
