Android Developers Finally Get a Taste of Honeycomb

After teasing developers for months with Honeycomb, the first version of Android that is designed specifically for tablets, Google released a preview SDK this morning. Honeycomb has a completely different user interface influenced by Matias Duarte, who was behind the look and feel of Palm's WebOS; Google calls it "holographic" and it has a 3D feel, reminiscent of Apple's Expose. There are five home screens and a bottom, persistent "System Bar" that helps users navigate through OS. Users who are multi-tasking, for example, can pull up recent applications from it. A second "Action Bar" at the top is for users to navigate through individual applications. It can change in look and feel, depending on what the app developer wants. The keyboard has an added 'Tab' key and lets users hold keys to switch from text to voice input -- showing off Google's speech-to-text technology, an area of strength for the company. Supporting Honeycomb's look is a new animation framework lets developers add visual effects to their apps, including fades, loops of an animated image and the ability to change colors. Honeycomb also lets developers create widgets such as search boxes, a calendar or pop-up menu that can be added to homescreen. Developers also get deeper access to notifications and can add icons or a priority flag to them. Google's suite of apps were also redesigned for the larger screen size. E-mail and Contacts adopt the familiar two-pane user interface that Apple's mail and Twitter have popularized in the last year. Unlike Apple's iPad, Honeycomb's browser has tabs. Away from the front-end, Honeycomb is the first version of Android that can run on either single or multicore processor architectures.

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Android Developers Finally Get a Taste of Honeycomb

Kim-Mai Cutler

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Kim-Mai Cutler