Motorola Xoom Will Not Get 4G LTE Until Late Summer

[dgstorm]

Sadly, it looks like even the new Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 4G LTE version will come "out of the box" with actual 4G LTE capability before the Motorola Xoom's will be available for upgrade. Earlier today CEO Sanjay Jha confirmed the end of summer schedule at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch 2011 Technology Conference. Here's what he said,

“We are late with 4G LTE on Verizon’s network,” Jha said before finishing off with a reminder of the statement he made during their last earnings call, “We will deliver LTE solutions this summer.”

Verizon and Motorola originally planned for the Xoom upgrade to occur at the end of May or June, but they ran into technical issues. Later on in the talks, Mr. Jha, indirectly indicated these problems may have been because of NVIDIA's Tegra 2 Chip.

Rumor in the industry has suggested that the Tegra 2 chip has had serious problems with LTE radios. Here is a quote from the Droid-Life article detailing some of Mr. Jha's comments for you to "read between the lines" yourselves,

He did sort of take blame for the delay though and dropped this little nugget today, “We were delayed on two 4G products because of network interaction issues with our protocol stack.”

The odd thing is, that just 30 seconds later when asked how they can prevent such a delay from happening again, Jha made reference to having burned bridges and “betting everything on one place.” We can only assume he’s referring to their decision to go with NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 processor (which has been rumored to not cooperate with 4G LTE radios) rather than TI’s new OMAP or Qualcomm’s new dual-core, because as he continued he talked of working with all chipset manufacturers going forward so that they have fallback plans.

It was an odd talk, and one that clearly painted Motorola in a falling behind the curve pack. They have now been beaten to the 4G LTE wave by HTC, Samsung and LG in phones and are about to be in tablets as well. They better hope the Bionic knocks all of our socks off or it’s going to be one long year for our friends that brought us the original DROID.

The folks over at Droid-Life had a good "read" on his comments. It'll be interesting to see if the rumors about Tegra 2 problems turn out to be true, and, if NVIDIA can't fix them quickly enough, how quickly the smartphone and tablet manufacturers start moving to Texas Instruments or Qualcomm.

Of course, that really still leaves Xoom owners "out in the cold" until the end of the summer if they want 4G LTE, regardless. What a major misstep by Motorola, one that may not have been completely their fault, but sometimes that happens in the technology world. Being the first one out the door with a new product isn't always the best way. What do you guys think?

Source: XoomForums.com via Droid-Life

 

[pbrauer]

Thanks for the great update!

 

[Bob83]

I'm new to all of this and in the process of watching the market to make a decision on which tablet to buy. So far I like the Samsung Galaxy 10.1, but does this mean they and others will have problems with 4G LTE as well?

 

[pbrauer]

Well Bob, that is the $10,000 question. I would say most likely no, since they will make sure that things that are released compatible going backward. My guess is what we are dealing with here is the fact that the Xoom was released to market before 4G was rolled out, and so there was insufficient time to test properly to get a real good idea of what was involved in patching the Xoom to run on the 4G network.

things are moving pretty fast and it doesn't seem that the vendors are doing quite the due diligence we might like for them to do.