Motorola tablets get Ice Cream Sandwich

A number of Motorola tablets are now receiving updates to Android 4.0.

The updated version of Google’s mobile operating system, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich, is rolling out to the Droid Xyboard 8.2 as well as the Droid Xyboard 10.1 in the US.

The company is also pushing out Ice Cream Sandwich updates to the Xoom 2 WiFi and the Xoom Family Edition devices in Europe.

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 a decent amount of active Android devices, despite having a slow initial rollout in the early part of the year.

Google saw Android 4.0 as 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.

Of course, the release of Android 4.1, Jelly Bean, sort of quashes those hopes. Around 2% of all Android devices are already running the Jelly Bean software.