14 DAY TRIAL // Android 3.0 was a big milestone for the tablet market, but it has since been surpassed, not once but twice, so Motorola figured it was time a couple of its tablets caught up to the times.
The tablets we are referring to are the Droid Xyboard 8.2 and the Xyboard 10.1, but it isn't perfectly accurate to say that the software will be up to date once the upgrade is done.
Though the OS will be refined, sure enough, it will move from 3.0 Honeycomb to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, not the more recent Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.
Nevertheless, it bears noting that Jelly Bean is a fairly recent development in and of itself, so Ice Cream Sandwich is in no way old.
That said, owners of one of the aforementioned tablets only need to make sure a Wi-Fi connection is active if they want to receive the software over the air.
One new addition to the device capabilities is a voice to text function in one of 20 languages, initiated simply by touching the microphone on the keyboard.
A second new capability is the ability to dismiss individual notifications and apps from the Recent Apps list with just a finger swipe.
Third, there is a new setting for the power button, which sets it so that it immediately locks the device when pressed. A query will appear automatically if a pattern, PIN or password lock is detected, and sets a timer for locking after pressing the sleep button.
The last new asset is Face Unlock, which uses the front-facing camera to “look” at you and detect whether or not the one trying to open the device really is the owner.
And now we get to the section of improvements, and we dare say that Android 4.0 optimizes most, if not every, element already part of Honeycomb, an updated browser, redesigned app launcher, a better “People” application, better text input and spell checking, extended imaging capabilities and resizable widgets are just several entries on the long list of improvements.