XDA Developers' Android Hacker's Toolkit

Chapter 12: Motorola Xoom: An Unlocked Honeycomb Tablet

In this chapter:

• Information about the Motorola Xoom

• Rooting the Motorola Xoom

The Xoom is an unlocked tablet that was released with the Honeycomb (Android 3.0) operating system. It was one of the first tablets released with this version of Android.

The Xoom is considered a developers’ device. As with its Google Experience Device stablemates, it is easily unlocked using the Fastboot commands. Rooting and flashing custom ROMs is easy. However, the Honeycomb source code was released late by Google, at the same time as the source for Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0). Both Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich have nearly identical driver requirements, so most developers did not see the point in building custom ROMs for an inferior OS version. This means that there are fewer custom ROMs for it than there are for other versions of Android for which developers have access to the source code repositories.

Resources Required for this Walkthrough

To carry out the procedure, you need the following setup:

• The Xoom needs to be in Debug mode.

• ADB must be installed and functioning.

• An external SD card must be installed on the Xoom.

• You must download the following files from the XDA forum at http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=17135571:

• the root zip file

• the image recovery file.

Walkthrough

The basic steps of rooting the Xoom are as follows:

1. Place the root zip file on the SD card.

2. Unlock the Xoom.

3. ...