There were a couple of reasons that many Motorola Xoom owners, myself included, were concerned we may not see Android 4.2 on our devices any time soon. First, Google decided to drop both the Xoom and Nexus S from the Android Open Source Project—effectively leaving them to live out their final days on Android 4.1, in official capacity at least. There were also concerns about the size of the /system partition. Obviously as the Android operating system evolves, ROMs become larger and begin to approach the limits of system space available on some older devices. All that is now irrelevant though thanks to those stalwarts of Xoom development, Team EOS.

EOS4 Nightlies are based on Android 4.2, and will hopefully, in time, bring the full 4.2 experience to the now somewhat aged Xoom. At the moment, there are still bugs to be ironed out, and some of the newer features are yet to be implemented. These are, after all, nightly builds. However given the track record of Team EOS, you can rest assured that things will only keep getting better. On the whole, things are looking good, but make sure to check the thread so you know what to expect. At the moment, these builds are only for the WiFi only Xoom, the Wingray.

Check out the forum thread for more information.

The Motorola Xoom is a marvelous device. Being the first Honeycomb tablet and the lead device for an iteration of Android are great accomplishments. Poking fun at Apple in the Xoom’s Super Bowl ad is an even better accomplishment. Just because the Xoom is “only” dual-core and reaching its second birthday (way past retirement age in the mobile device world) doesn’t mean it’s a legacy or forgotten device.

XDA Recognized Contributor and Wingray supporter extraordinaire stachre has released a stock build of Android 4.1.2 with root. This is a follow-up to his stock Android 4.1.1 with root thread, which was itself a follow up to his stock Android 4.0.4 with root thread, and so on. In fact stachre has released a stock ROM with root for every version since Android 3.1.

What are you waiting for? Go to his latest thread and get stock Android 4.1.2 with root installed on your Wingray Xoom. Reports in the thread says it works for the Stingray variant as well, so read the thread and find out if it will work for you.

Recently, the Motorola Xoom joined the exclusive list of devices that have gotten an official taste of Google’s latest and greatest. With that, the Motorola Xoom joins the Nexus 7 as the only two tablets with official Jelly Bean updates. Now, users can upgrade to official Jelly Bean without losing root, recovery, or their unlocked bootloaders.

XDA Recognized Contributor stachre, who is no stranger to this process, has posted a repackaged update that will keep the Xoom rooted with the bootloader unlocked and custom recovery. Currently, there are other options for Jelly Bean custom ROMs, but they all involve a bunch of modifications. This is just the update repackaged to include the bare essentials.

The process to install is pretty easy, as it’s basically just like installing any other ROM. Users will download the repackaged update, reboot into custom recovery, create a backup, wipe everything, and flash the ROM. This will also install the new bootloader, which will come unlocked, so users will get a message congratulating them on updating the bootloader. Thus far the only real troubleshooting issue is that some users get stuck on the Motorola splash screen after the update. Performing a factory reset in recovery fixes this most of the time and restoring a Nandroid backup should take care of it if that doesn’t work.

For more details, check out the original thread.

Google is currently in the process of rolling out Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean to various Google Experience Devices. It has already been made available for the Galaxy Nexus, and later the Nexus S. The update is now heading towards the US WiFi version of Motorola Xoom (Wingray). If you own the first Google-supported Android tablet and want to get Jelly Bean up and running on it, wait no more!

While you can wait for your table to receive the update, many prefer to install the update manually. To manually install the update, you must currently be running the official Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich IMM76 firmware, as the OTA is an incremental update. That said, pre-rooted full ROM packages should start appearing soon in the Motorola Xoom forum.

You must have a USB host cable in order to flash the update manually. This is because the file has to be renamed to update.zip, placed on a USB stick or (or memory card inserted into a USB card reader), connected to the device via the USB host cable, and flashed from the stock recovery.

You can grab the update from Google’s servers, see how to install it on your XOOM, or head over to XDA Forum Member 2010gt‘s forum thread to join the discussion.

Update: There is another, much larger thread that was posted earlier and has more active discussion going on about the update so you might want to check it out if you run into any problems.

Since the Jelly Bean source code was released, developers have been head-over-heels trying to get Jelly Bean on their devices. The first releases will most likely be for devices running the pure Google experience. As the Motorola Xoom happens to be one of those devices, it’s no surprise the tablet was among the first to receive the goods.

Development team teameos has begun pumping out AOSP-built Jelly Bean nightly builds for the Motorola Xoom WiFi and 4G editions—also known as the Wingray and Stingray, respectively. Because they’re nightlies, teameos doesn’t provide a clear list of the features currently working. However, they do provide a change log of what they changed from day to day, so users can at least see what’s been fixed or what still needs fixed.

Depending on the changes the developers made that day, the performance and stability can change drastically from release to release. As some changes can be unstable and some can be stable, teameos gives the customary warning that a particular release may be less stable than an older release. Despite that, user reports have been overwhelmingly positive.

For additional information, download links and more, head to the Wingray thread or the Stingray thread.

[Thanks to XDA Portal Admin willverduzco for the image!]