The Xoom tablet has a respectably fast Verizon 3G connection, but Motorola promises a free upgrade to Verizon's faster 4G network within a few months.

To do that, however, you'll need to ship your Xoom back to the manufacturer for more than a week.

It's not often I laugh out loud when researching a post, but when reading up on the Motorola Xoom 3G to 4G upgrade procedure, I sounded like barking dog. If anyone has ever designed a more convoluted, ridiculous way to rush an unfinished product to market, I have yet to see it. But more on that in a moment.

Of course, you can buy Motorola's Android 3.0–powered, 3G-enabled Xoom today. The promised upgrade to 4G is now slated for May (officially "90 days after launch"), and the upgrade involves shipping the tablet back to Motorola (also free) and waiting up to six business days (translation: more than a week). This despite the fact that the Xoom is clearly designed for easy upgrades, and the upgrade procedure probably takes no more than 10 minutes.

For customers who are happy to be without their tablets for a while, this is clearly good news: You get a free bump to use faster 4G networks. It's good for Verizon, too, as you might sign up for a 4G plan (although you don't have to). But for Motorola it's plain dumb.

I don't know how much it costs to pay for two-way shipping, opening up a tablet and replacing a part, but I can bet it isn't cheap. After all, there's a reason that replacing gadgets is often cheaper than repairing them. Add to this the fact that Motorola will have cut profit margins to the bone to compete with the iPad, and I can see this stunt losing the company a lot of money.

So why do it? Why not wait until it is ready and launch it in the summer? Two words: iPad 2. The iPad 2 will be here in April, and maybe even as early as next week, at which time many of the Xoom's "advantages" will disappear. If our guesses are right, the Xoom's camera and fast processor will no longer be unique, and the only extra will be 4G, aka "the ability to connect to a fast but sparsely deployed data network." It seems rather obvious that Motorola was absolutely desperate to get its tablet out the door before Apple makes it irrelevant.

So, want to hear about what had me chuckling? Take a look at the "Getting Ready Guide" for the upgrade. Sandwiched in the middle is rather huge section on backing up your data before sending it off to Motorola. It boils down to this: Connect your Xoom via USB, dig down through its file system and then copy (via drag and drop) the files and folders onto your computer.

Then, when your machine is finally returned after surgery, you put it all back again. Just the kind of thing Auntie May will find it dead-easy to do.

And that's before we even get to encrypting the contents to keep it safe in transit ("If you interrupt the encryption process, you will lose some or all of your data").

Remind me why nobody is buying Android tablets, again?

Motorola Xoom Upgrade program [Verizon via Droid Life]

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