Motorola Xoom tablet gets Ice Cream Sandwich

The latest version of Android is being rolled out to Motorola’s Xoom tablet.

Android 4.0, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich, was scheduled to begin its Xoom upgrade process today, June 4.

This makes it the first Android tablet offered with Verizon 4G LTE service (or any Verizon service for that matter) to get the push to the next level of Google’s mobile OS.

Ice Cream Sandwich is one of the biggest updates to Android yet, and includes such features as scanning your face to unlock the phone, a much more robust speech-to-text software program, and an entire platform of data sharing that focuses on Near Field Communication (NFC).

Several other manufacturers have pledged support for the new update, and a bunch of phones currently running an older version of Android.

Ice Cream Sandwich is now powering 4.9% of active Android devices, according to the company’s most recently released official statistics.

Google hopes Android 4.0 will be a big reset button on the mobile platform, since it has much stricter hardware guidelines that it hopes will help prevent fragmentation in the future. This is a goal we’ve heard in previous rollouts of Android, so we’ll see if it actually is realized this time.