Las Vegas — Relentlessly striving to keep its products in the limelight, search engine behemoth Google took to the stage to show off a preview of its hotly awaited, tablet-optimized Android 3.0, aka “Honeycomb,” during a keynote speech Thursday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Android-based tablets have gained big attractions at the massive CES show this year, and companies including Motorola Mobility (MMI) and Toshiba had said they would wait to unleash their new tablets until Honeycomb was released.
Thursday’s demo was presented by Android developer Mike Cleron, who showed Honeycomb on a new Motorola tablet. With Honeycomb, the search engine giant spent more than a year evaluating about how to rebuild Android from the ground-up, he said. The demo took place on the Xoom, a new tablet that Motorola unveiled in a CES presentation on Wednesday.
The company “concentrated on taking all the things people already love about Android and making them richer.” “We wanted our tablet experience to be better, not just bigger,” said Cleron.
In a blog post Thursday, Google emphasized on features including a holographic user interface, home screen customization, desktop-like Web browsing and simpler multitasking.
The tablet-oriented Honeycomb is meant to improve upon previous Android iterations. Google made a lot of efforts to make its widgets more powerful and focused a lot especially on making customization and multi-tasking more seamless. Indeed, multi-tasking worked quite well during the demo–a line of previously used apps were on the left-hand side of the screen, and Cleron picked up where he left off in a game of Dungeon Defenders just by tapping the preview pane.
The video below shows a tablet running a vastly improved user interface designed specifically for touchscreen devices. Honeycomb requires no physical buttons on a tablet. Rather, it displays buttons on the screen. The advantage to that design is that the buttons appear on the bottom of the screen no matter which way the user is holding the tablet.
Cleron demonstrated the way that widgets work in Honeycomb, describing that they are more powerful. He also displayed off virtual controls at the bottom of the tablet’s screen, rather than physical or touch buttons. Cleron also demoed Gmail, which has been redesigned for tablets, and his demo of a Google Maps that tilts, zooms, and rotates got a few oohs and aahs from the crowd. “Yeah, it is pretty awesome!” Cleron quipped after the audience’s response. A Gmail widget let him scroll through e-mail messages quickly from the home screen. A calendar widget works similarly.
Notifications of new messages now fetches more information, than the previous Android versions. For example, when a user receives an email, the notification that pops up includes a small phone of the person who sent the message.
Honeycomb also offers widgets for individual contacts. That means a user can staple a widget to the home screen for a friend and see updates about that person appear automatically. The feature is reminiscent of the tiles that Microsoft features on Windows Phone 7 which allows users to create a tile for a person that updates with recent information about the person.
“It displays you what you can do with an OS designed from the ground up for multitasking,” Cleron said.
Technology blog Engadget describing the new operating system said, “this looks more or less nothing like Android. Sure, the browser is the same, and the Gmail app will be familiar to iPad users, but trust us when we say there is a lot of lovely UI in the video below to admire.”
While manufacturers are busy showing off their new Android 3.0-powered tablets at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas, the video below provides the first real glimpse of the 3.0 operating system in use. It also suggests (thanks to the “Built Entirely for Tablet” text early on in the video) that Google’s Android 3.0 operating system will be reserved just for tablets.
The video was first published on Google’s Offical Android Developers YouTube channel but shortly thereafter made private. Android blog Android Police grabbed a backup of the video and have posted it on their own YouTube channel here.