From the outside, tablets are almost all the same, especially when seen from the front. But like a pretty actor in a reality TV show, once you get under their skin you find out what really makes them tick. So it is with the Motorola Xoom, which has been opened up and photographed by — you guessed it — iFixit.
First off, it’s surprisingly easy to get in, requiring nothing but a Torx screwdriver to get the bulk of the cover off. This makes sense, as Motorola is going to be taking a lot of these apart to swap in 4G chipsets in the summer.
In fact, a lot of the design seems influenced by this crazy plan. To perform the swap, all a technician needs to do is remove those Torx screws, slide the rear cover open, remove a dummy chip-board and swap in the new one, reconnecting the antennas. It sounds a lot like swapping out Wi-Fi cards in a netbook, only with less screws. Here’s what iFixit has to say:
A seasoned technician can perform this swap in less than 10 minutes. Heck, a donkey could probably pull it off in less than two hours. We have no idea why a customer couldn’t just go to a Verizon store and have on-site representatives enable 4G on the spot, just like they’re able to transfer mobile contacts and perform other activation procedures.
Once inside, the first thing that you see is the huge battery, which is just as it should be: A tablet that doesn’t last all day is a tablet that isn’t worth buying. Then it’s onto the cameras (connected by separate cables for easy replacement), the speakers and then the main circuit board. As you already know, this contains the Nvidia Tegra T2 dual-core ARM A9 CPU and GeForce GPU. There’s not a lot of magic inside of any of these tablets — the trick is just to keep enough space spare to fit in a big battery.
IFixit rates the Xoom pretty high for fixability, and everything can be gotten out with “a spudger and a couple of Torx screwdrivers.” You’ll need some patience to tear everything down to the bare metal, though, because “there’s just a lot of labor involved with removing that many screws.”
Motorola Xoom Teardown [iFixit. Thanks, Miroslav!]
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