Sigh. The life of a Xoom owner must be one drenched in cold sorrow and pain. Not only is the tablet constantly out classed by tablets costing hundreds less, but now Xooms here in the states are looking longingly across the pond. The Android 3.1 update is just now hitting Xooms outside the US and enabling the long-dead microSD card slot. In fact the verbiage in the official Motorola statement is “non-U.S.” devices, which should be borderline obnoxious to the first adopters here. That said, there is a rhyme and reason here. But it’s not a good one.
The US Xoom was the first Honeycomb device. It was the flagship Honeycomb device and so considered a Google Experience Device. This seemingly brings more downfalls than incentives as Motorola can only push official updates to device; Google is pulling the strings. The Xoom’s outside the US are slightly different hardware and so are not considered GEDs. This update, though just rolling out, is thought to include the same non-Google-sanctioned hack Asus and others are using to bring microSD card support to Android 3.x since its not natively included.
The end result is that US Xooms will not see a working microSD card slot until Google and Motorola are done with the software — it’s up to the xda folk now.