I went to the Verizon website last Thursday and submitted my upgrade form.  The FedEx shipping box arrived the next day!

I got a late start backing up my Xoom on Sunday evening and was unable to ship it back today (Monday.)   The reason?  I ran into locked file issues that caused the manual backup to my desktop computer to fail.  I went through trial and error, until I came to the conclusion that power cycling the Xoom resolved the issue.  I made a manual backup earlier today to my laptop.

 

I’m somewhat conflicted about two things in regards to shipping the Xoom back to Verizon.  The directions – and I understand completely why- that you must either wipe the device to factory defaults or encrypt the tablet prior to shipping it back.  Once you encrypt the tablet, it remains encrypted and it requires you to enter the decryption pass code every time the tablet it restarted.   The only way to remove the encryption is to perform a factory default wipe.

 

I will most likely wipe the device, before I ship it back I would have eventually been forced to do this. This makes me somewhat nervous.   Google does automatically store your app data in their ‘cloud.’  When you log into your gmail account for the first time after a wipe, the device is supposed to download all of your apps and app data.    I’ve seen that there are issues with free apps reestablishing themselves, but I know that they will be displayed on my Google account and can easily be downloaded again.  I should also be able to copy their app data files back onto the Xoom from my manual backup.

It’s easy to say all of these things, but I must still pull the trigger this evening!  If anything…it should make for an interesting post when they ship my Xoom back to me.