Xoom Teardown

The Motorola Xoom tablet has only been on sale for a matter of days, but it's already been torn down, hacked, and modified to run at an overclocked speed of 1.5GHz—50 percent faster than the unmodified Xoom. While product hacking and teardowns are common with new devices, the speed at which they're happening this time suggests the Xoom is particularly susceptible to user modification. Did Motorola design the the Xoom to be hackable?

While Motorola wouldn't comment on specific design decisions, the evidence is apparent in what owners have been able to do in such a short period of time. As mentioned, enthusiasts and developers often hack and disassemble new devices soon after they're on sale, especially high-profile releases like the tablets and Apple products. But in the Xoom's case a few of the modifications were unusually fast and easy, with some sites reporting the tablet was hacked within an hour of launch.

Disassembling the Xoom revealed that the device is easier to modify than expected, according to teardown site iFixit. The person who performed the teardown, Miroslav Djuric, gave "major props" to Motorola for designing the casing in such a way that prying tools weren't needed to open it up.

Motorola most likely made the casing so easy to open in anticipation of many owners wanting to upgrade the current 3G Xoom to 4G connectivity. As we reported last week, the upgrade involves sending the Xoom in to get a 4G chip installed, a process that can take a week. Based on its teardown, however, iFixit estimates the upgrade could be performed by a technician in about 10 minutes. Anyone would-be modders should be aware, though, if you hack your Xoom, you may render it ineligible for the mail-in 4G upgrade.

Then over the weekend, self-described Android developer/hacker Michael Huang was able to modify his Xoom so the dual-core Tegra 2 chip powering it could run at 1.5GHz. Although running the Xoom at such a speed may have side effects like a lower battery life, Huang was able to do it extremely quickly, and the instructions are simple enough that he was able to summarize it in six steps.

The key to the hack was Motorola making the Xoom's bootloader customizable, which the company confirmed on Twitter last week. That lets developers more easily run different kinds of software on the tablet, giving them deeper access to how the hardware (like the Tegra 2 chip) actually runs.

The approach of an easily modified Xoom is in stark contrast to Apple's approach of keeping a tight lid—literally and figuratively—on its products. Although various parties have successfully hacked most versions of iOS to "jailbreak" iPhones and iPads, Apple frowns on the practice. However, last summer the U.S. copyright office declared such modifications legal and falling withing the boundaries of "fair use."

Apple also recently changed how it assembles its devices, using a different kind of screw that's more difficult to remove. Since the tamper-resistant screws use a non-standard head, tools to for removing them are rare.

The Xoom, on the other hand, appears to be built to encourage developers and enthusiasts to take it apart and explore. Will that give the tablet an edge in the marketplace? It may, though most likely only with a small—but passionate—cross-section of users.
