Xoom gets rooted, overclocked and disassembled
Whenever a new gadget is out there is always a few special (and I mean that in a good way) people who immediately tear into it in their own special way. The Xoom is no exception, and since the launch it has now been rooted, overclocked and disassembled.
The people at iFixit are behind the disassembly, as always. They basically make money by selling replacement parts for popular gadgets, and get publicity to do so by always being the first to disassemble new gadgets. They have tons of very clear pictures of every part of the insides of the Xoom so if you want to see how all the parts fit together it’s a nice read. Maybe they’ll have a DIY option for when it’s time to upgrade to LTE, but for now you can at least buy the tools necessary to take it apart yourself if you for some reason feel the need to.
The Xoom has also been rooted, which was inevitable. Just as with the iPad and jailbreaking there’s always the choice whether to go with the stock setup or not, and while I personally am tired of anything that doesn’t do what I need out of the box I think it’s awesome that there are people out there who love hacking away at their new toys.
Lastly, the Xoom has been overclocked, and this is one of the things I talked about last sentence with “hacking away” at new toys. One guy got his Xoom up to 1.5Ghz, which is a 50% increase from the stock 1Ghz. Both benchmarks and his own real world experience says that the device is much faster when overclocked, but who knows how much battery life is affected or if it will have other side effects. Our own Xoom owner here at NBT, Grahm, says the UI is a bit sluggish, so maybe this is the solution. I once overclocked my Viliv S5 Windows UMPC and that was a night and day change, but the Zoom should already be able to keep up with its OS, unlike the Viliv.
