We installed Google’s first public access of Android 3.0 Honeycomb OS on our tablet, an early build of the platform’s SDK that features “non-final” code and APIs. Intended for developers, this test- driven tablet wishes to shares our quick observations:
- Honeycomb emulator like prior Android SDKs is extremely slow. We were highly disappointed, as it drove us to a point of uselessness.
- Earlier it appeared an orientation bug prevented us from going landscape, and our hopes were dampened, again. But, now we’ve figured out the orientation trick — you need to uncheck automatic orientation in Settings, then flip the emulator from landscape to portrait.
- The browser looks awesome, especially the UI, which is going to make desktop browser users feel right at home. Our users experience was incomprehensible due to a slow emulator, but we’re digging the look.
- The system for adding and managing widgets is a simple joy– it makes your desktop accessible from a single screen, and we adored the amount of detail you can preview for each widget before deciding whether to use it and where to place it.
- Window animations and screen transitions seem cool, but none were smooth or fast in the emulator to know for sure. Hope by the time we use actual tablets, Honeycomb will work well.
- The time display has been squashed, segmented and dimmed, we hope Google has alternative fonts available.
Since the emulator does not offer “Google experience” build with access to the Android Market, Gmail, or other “branded” Google apps, we were unable to deep-dive on how real-world applications are going to look on the platform, never mind Motorola’s Xoom should be shipping within a few weeks.
