[Xoom Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] dizzy33:
Hello,

I installed (with pain) the official stock jelly bean on my GEDified Xoom. I thought "project butter" was a real big improvement, according to what I could read in many threads, I was then asking myself why, if it's such a big improvement, the release name didn't change to 5.0 instead of 4.1.1...

Now I have my answer !

Launcher :

I can say yes, there is a fluidity enhancements, but not as much as expected. I could not see much differences between ICS and JB regarding the fluidity, the stock launcher has only been improved a bit : if an icon page is full of icons, with 2 widgets on it, then there are a few lags ...

I use Nova launcher since ICS, and this one is really smooth as butter, much more than the stock JB launcher. You can put 3 or 4 widgets on a same icons page with absolutly no lag at all.

Web browser :

The same with the default JB web browser : I can feel improvements, but some web pages (with no Flash activated) are still laggy ... Compare it with Opera Mini and you will see what smooth as butter should mean ! Opera is just perfectly smooth, no lag at all on any web page.

Non-Google applications :

I couldn't find any fluidity enhancement when running non-google applications. The applications which where laggy with ICS are still laggy with JB, and unfortunatly, perfectly smooth Android applications are too rares ...

I can't even really use most of the new features of JB :

- I can't use the new icons auto-rearranging when moving a widget on a page as the stock launcher is not smooth enough for me, I use Nova Launcher which is perfectly fluid but does not have this feature.

- I can't ear the beautifull voice of Google Voice Search, as I'm french, and it only works for English language ... But I'm not even sure the problem is here, the main problem is that on the official stock JB release, there is no "download offline speach recognition" option in Google Now, so you just cannot activate it. But you can do it on a Team EOS ROM !!!!! This is a shame !!!

- I forgot this one ... I even lost an important feature ! My external SD Card could read or write with ICS, now it's READ ONLY !!!

As the fluidity is my main concern on my Xoom, I was disapointed, I was expecting too many improvements when I read threads of people testing Jelly Bean, so by making this thread I hope I will help people not yet running JB to not be disapointed as I am.

Now I hope the "project butter" is not closed at Google as there are still many improvements to do on this point, I can say that because some third party applications are perfectly smooth where the Google ones are not, so it is not an hardware problem, I am pretty sure that a dual core tablet should be enough to display 2D applications smoothly. But will our good old Xoom receive the future major Android release ? I don't think so as we are already lucky enough to receive JB after more than one year of existence for the Xoom ... But there are still a few bugs to remove in JB, I hope Google will update it (I never had a single crash when running ICS, on JB, I had one the first day I used it when I tried to change the background wall paper, my screen became black and the Xoom rebooted ...).

So now I am thinking of trying a JB custom ROM, but it was so painful to me to restore all my data and applications after the official OTA update (my bootloader was unlocked so the OTA didn't work, I had to put back my Xoom to a factory state with locked bootloader which let me loose all my data) that I'm now a bit lazy and not sure that the custom ROM will be smooter than the stock one.