Many early adopter Xoom customers are voicing issues with their tablets not offering the popular YouTube app.
Motorola’s Owner Forumsandvariousothersourcesshow that the issue has been reported since the Xoom launched. Today, I ran into it, too.
Watching YouTube videos via the Android 3.0 browser works even without the application.
Motorola and Google have showcased the native YouTube app many times to demo how polished and stylish their new tablet OS really is. With the app not being available, a fun part of the user experience is gone for fresh Xoom users.
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Before jumping right into a non-official fix, here is what all Xoom users reporting the problem experience:
Multiple factory resets do not help, nor does reinstalling YouTube from the Android Market.
In fact, the latter makes things even worse. Turns out, the Android Market is not aware about the full new version of the YouTube app for Androidtablets. It compares the version reported by the Xoom with it’s own list of known versions forsmartphonesand (wrongly!) offers an “update”.
Neither Motorola, nor Google have officially responded, yet.
An unofficial fix – and as always, you do this at your own risk – is as follows:
I can confirm, this worked for me.
One more thing: Admittedly, I am a huge Apple fan, mostly using an iPad 2. My professional life forced me to check out the Xoom.
While I’m really surprised with the usability and performance of Honeycomb, it’s these kind of low-level problems, that ruin almost the entire experience for me.
Do you own the Motorola Xoom? Did you run into any of these problems? Let us know in the comments!
Story byRalf
Ralf Rottmann is a serial entrepreneur from Germany. He successfully sold his last business to Alcatel-Lucent. Follow him as @24z on Twitter(show all)Ralf Rottmann is a serial entrepreneur from Germany. He successfully sold his last business to Alcatel-Lucent. Follow him as@24zon Twitter and onGoogle+
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