The really good news…I received my Xoom back on Wednesday at about 11:30am.  It was only away for about 4.5 days, which fell well within their advertised turn around time.

The Xoom is a lot faster now, including boot up time. I was pleasantly surprised.

The bad news.  Recovery was well, a bitch.   I decided to wipe it to factory defaults, before copying my data back onto it.  I then recreated my gmail account access on the Xoom and allowed it to recover data from Google.  I began thinking that this won’t be so bad.

I then copied the manual backup onto the Xoom and that took a while.

I soon realized that I would have to go to both the Amazon Market and the Android Market to donwload every App I had paid for.  Individually.

It got a little worse.   I had read on blog and soon confirmed that the stores will not retain a list of every free App you had installed.   Essentially, I may not have been able to remember every free App I grabbed.

Launcher Pro was able to read it’s backup, but the widgets had to be removed and recreated.  They show up as something like ‘Unable to load widget.’

CircleLauncher…I apparently had never made a backup of the data, so I had to manually recreate every CircleLauncher from scratch. That was a major pain.

Music.  Yes, I was able to copy all of my music back onto the Xoom, but guess what?  The backup doesn’t include the playlists I had created.

This was not a happy experience.  I have since discovered that the Astra file manager will let you create a backup of every App you have installed.  This should help next time.

However, I may have to go through this again, because I’ve been contemplating rooting my Xoom, but that means it has to be wiped to factory defaults again.  I’m not really looking forward to that prospect right now.