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By Bob T. Wilson
The mobile world has awaited the arrival of ‘Honeycomb,’ the 3.0 release of Google’s runaway hit mobile device OS, Android. Android is already the dominant force in the mobile market with dozens of smartphones released by almost every manufacturer running on the open source platform. The Honeycomb release is a major move for Google, and according to Google executives, it was a major development effort as well.
The most important aspect of Honeycomb 3.0 is that this is the first Android OS version built and optimized especially for tablet PCs. Additionally, the graphics, menu systems, and display handling have been optimized for larger tablet screens. Could this perhaps be a hint as to the direction that tablet development is heading? However, this does not mean that smaller screen tablets won’t benefit as well.
The Empty App Store
The problem with the initial release of Honeycomb was the lack of compatible apps for the OS. When Motorola announced the Xoom at the 2011 CES, no apps were yet available, and only 16 had been developed for the OS by the time it released the last week of Feb. 2011. Part of the reason was that the Android 3.0 Software Development Kit (SDK) had not been made available to developers yet. Nevertheless, several weeks later Google announced its availability and as of March, the Android Marketplace was sporting 60+ Honeycomb Apps-finally.
This number will increase drastically as the Android tablet market expands, which is a given as developers are hungry for a solid competitor to the iPad and its restrictive market. Most major manufacturers are either planning development or already developing Honeycomb specific tablets, and as they come to market, the number of Apps will expand as well.
The First Real Android Tablet
The first real tablet to come with Android Honeycomb 3.0 is the Motorola Xoom, which is a large screen, high-powered tablet released at the 2011 CES International with hopes of directly competing with the Apple iPad, and might as well have been built specifically for Honeycomb. There are others, such as the Samsung Galaxy S Tab 10.1 and the LG G-Slate, which are larger screen models as well as designed with Android Honeycomb 3.0 in mind. Part of the reason for the lackluster performance of first generation Android tablets against the iPad was the lack of an OS that was designed specifically for tablets. Android 2.2 is a well-developed smartphone OS, but lacks support for critical aspects of tablet operation that finally Honeycomb provided.
A Fast Start
Many of the initial Apps should be ports of existing and popular Android 2.2 apps, but we should expect to see native tablet apps in increasing number as well. The entire Android ecosystem is open source, and the Android 3.0 SDK is free to download. Developing an App takes only time and there are no restrictive policies for posting them on the Android marketplace. The combination of these factors and the huge success of Android with smartphone manufacturers will insure that by mid-2011 there will be many Honeycomb tablets and thousands of Apps. The cost of the tablets will begin to come down and Apple may find it harder going in the tablet marketplace, one that is expected to become the number one venue for mobile Internet access.
About the Author: Bob T. Wilson is the technology writer at velocity guide, a site dedicated to keeping its readers informed of the constant advances in mobile computing technology and
Mobile Internet
.
Source:
isnare.com
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