Google's Honeycomb Tablet OS

Tuesday, August 2, 2011 | Tags:

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Google turns up the Android Honeycomb OS volume Wednesday at "A Taste of What's New from Android" event it will host at its Mountain View, Calif. campus. It's being billed as the first in-depth look at Android 3.0 (Honeycomb), the search giant's tablet-ready mobile OS. Honeycomb is geared to go head to head with Apple's iPad.
Scant Honeycomb details have been released so far. There was a developers' preview and Motorola showed off video hands-on demo of its Xoom tablet running Honeycomb. Motorola Xoom tablet is known as the first tablet generation which build by Andoid 3.0 Honeycomb, and it will become a well known OS as the tablet OS. Here's a look at some of the best elements of the new OS. From those two sneak peeks we know Honeycomb features tabbed browsing, a new camera interface, improved multitasking and multi-pane application views.
If Google is to sustain the Honeycomb buzz on Wednesday it will have to turn up the wow factor and offer up features that match and trump what Apple currently delivers with its iPad tablet.
(You can follow the "A Taste of What's New from Android" event live at 10 a.m. PT by visiting the live stream at YouTube.com/android.)
Since previous versions of Android were designed for 3- to 4-inch lower-resolution displays, anytime a manufacturer tried to use the OS on larger, higher-res displays, there was often screen blank space.
Here's my take on 5 key things Android needs to make that happen:

Easy Interface

Google looks like it will be packing a lot of interface features into Honeycomb tablets. In Honeycomb there will be no hardware buttons, you will have 5 customizable home screens to fill up with widgets and app shortcuts, and something that looks a lot like a Windows task bar. All those interface features could be an advantage, but it could also end up being extremely confusing. The iPad is well liked because it takes the simplified interface of the iPhone and translates it nicely to a tablet device. Android needs to do something similar.

The top left is a shortcut to dedicated Google and Voice commands. The top right takes you to your Apps and home-screen customization menu. Bottom left is the multitask button which shows you everything running—this is a nice addition, there's nothing like this in Android 2.3. The bottom right is the notification area—popups appear here (new e-mails, IMs, new apps installs, etc.). The notification area is like the pulldown notification tray in previous version of Android.

Flash

Apple has gone a long way to convince content providers to support iOS devices by providing an alternative to Flash video either on the Web or as an app in the App Store. But the fact is you will still run across Web video you can't watch on an iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad because of the lack of Flash. News junkies, for example, were probably grateful to find out that Al Jazeera English had an iPhone app so they could watch the latest events out of Egypt while on the go. The Doha-based news organization's live video stream on its Website uses Flash. Adobe's video format may not be the best technology for Web video, but Flash is certainly the most common.With flash we can play flash games, browse for some flash web, watch you tube from your tablet and the other feauture using flash player.

The new widgets in Android 3.0 are very noteworthy, and they're much more useful on a larger screen. For instance, the Gmail widget is terrific, you can scroll through the subject lines of your messages without actually entering the mail app. The new Gmail app takes cues from the iPad mail app, you scroll through your subject lines in the left pane while the right pane displays the body of the email.

The new Google Talk app offers video chat—it's basically Google's answer to Apple's FaceTime. It's long overdue for Android and it works quite well.
The last app that really stands out is the new Web browser—but there's good and bad. Like previous Android versions, you can zoom in to enlarge the text to a comfortable size and then double tap to make it fit within the screen, which is useful.