Root Your Motorola Xoom Tablet & Kiss Your 4G LTE Upgrade Goodbye

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A few hours ago we showed you Verizon’s official take on the Motorola Xoom 4G LTE upgrade, which pretty much confirmed previous information received from Motorola. Xoom owners will get their 4G LTE fix for free but there are certain conditions that apply which you should be aware off in case you’ll want LTE on your Xoom soon.

First of all, and this is pretty annoying from certain points of view, you’ll have to ship your Xoom to Motorola to receive the free upgrade. Sure that could end up being a pretty swift upgrade process but that doesn’t mean we’re looking at a hassle-free project. In fact, not only will you have to take care of your personal data and reset the device but you’ll also have to ship the tablet yourself, even if Verizon is paying for the shipping.

But the latest word on the street is that Motorola will not support LTE upgrades on rooted Xoom units. Those of you interested in rooting the Honeycomb tablet (and we’ve already seen root and unlock instructions for the device) should think twice before rooting as you could end up being ineligible for the upgrade. On the other hand, if you’re familiar with rooting procedures (not that we’d advise you to go for any rooting and unlocking solutions anyway) then you should have no problem restoring your stock Honeycomb firmware on the tablet, which should still get you that free LTE upgrade. At least, in theory!

The news comes form Motorola’s Support Forums where Motorola representatives addressed such questions recently although we assume clearer instructions will be offered later down the road. Of course, from a different point of view, it’s understandable that Motorola will need a regular stock Android 3.0 build installed on the Xoom in order to make a proper LTE update. After all, your could root the device after receiving that new 4G LTE radio right?Whatever the case might be, we’ll be back with more Xoom 4G LTE upgrade news once Motorola announces that it’s good and ready to offer it to early Xoom buyers.

Have you rooted your Xoom Honeycomb tablet yet?