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Is Android Honeycomb really ready for the big time?

Posted by Paul Hanley

The Android operating system from Google is currently the "hot" OS for mobile phone handsets. In the US alone, handsets running the Android operating system now command a 36.4% market share - well above the likes of Apple & RIM.

In 2010 Apple managed the impossible and created a tablet product that people actually wanted use never mind purchase. They have and continue to sell lorry loads of the tablet product. Google of course didn't want to miss out and a number of products started to surface from dubious sources in the far east that thought it would be great to put the current versions of the handset variant of Android on flaky hardware and sell out at below the iPad power house. These products of course didn't have Googles blessing and shipped without access to the official Android App Marketplace and didn't come pre-installed with the Google apps that make Android such a compelling proposition such as Maps, Navigation and Talk etc. It was only when Samsung stepped in to the market with some quality hardware in the form of the Galaxy Tab that the Android OS gained any real credibility but then the Samsung Galaxy Tab wasn't really anything other than a really big 7" Android phone.

In early 2011, Google announced to the world Android 3.0 or Honeycomb. This was to be the first version of the Android OS that was designed specifically for tablet based hardware and Motorola were at the event with the Xoom in hand to show off the new OS. Whilst the launch of the new Android 3.0 Honeycomb OS was to a big fanfare and Motorola was ready to ship Xoom's in the US at the end of February the operating system simply wasn't ready. Also, Google only really had Motorola ready with hardware - which is great if your Apple but not if you're anybody else besides Apple!

So March came and went and Motorola was stuck with warehouses full of unsold Xoom stock if you believe the reports. The Xoom still hadn't started shipping anywhere else outside of the US either. Thankfully April came and so did the Android Honeycomb tablets in the form of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer (a twist on the tablet form factor in the respect that it was designed from the ground up to take a keyboard which made the unit in to an Android netbook as well as doubling the battery life to 16hrs), the Acer A500 Iconia and Samsung announced their new Galaxy Tab 8.9 and 10.1 tablets which were going to be even more anorexic than the already svelte Apple iPad 2.

Whilst having the hardware available for customers to purchase is great, if you don't have a coherent OS and apps to run on it you are pretty much screwed (which might be why we have read stories of Motorola having warehouses full of stock that they can't ship).

Now Android, as an OS is quite clever. Whilst the Apple iPad will run most of the apps available for iPhone, unless they are written specifically for the iPad, all they do is scale up by a factor of two and usually look pretty blocky - and that's if they scale up at all, you could be left with a really nice app running in the middle of your iPad screen the size of an iPhone screen..... which is nice, not!!! Android on the other hand has been designed from the ground up to run at different resolutions. Unfortunately this is where the Android 3.0 Honeycomb problems begin.

Because the majority of Android apps run just fine on Honeycomb there is no real incentive for app developers to write code that is specific for Honeycomb. Let me give you some examples - apps from Google such as Browser, YouTube, Mail, Gmail, Earth, Maps and Navigation are fantastic because they take in to account the screen layout and resolution of Honeycomb and are written to make the most of it but if you look at even big hitting apps such as Facebook and eBay there is a whole lot of screen real estate which simply just isn't used - basically because the app has been designed for a mobile phone sized screen and resolution. Of course they work fine but you may as well just use them on your Android phone as you don't really get any benefit from having them on the bigger screen.

Also the fact that Google have already announced a re-amalgamation of the 2.x and 3.x versions of the Android OS in to version 4.x or Ice Cream Sandwich as it is being code named probably means that Googles aspirations of having a serious competitor to the Apple iPad are probably not going to be realised until later in the year.

There is no doubt that what Google has with Android as an OS is a fantastic place for them to be and in such a short period of time has gone from zero to pretty much what a lot of people consider hero. The Android App Marketplace is growing at an amazing rate and will surely at some point in the not so distant future surpass the might Apple App Store in the sheer number of apps that are available. Honeycomb and the hardware that it runs on are also the first signs of Google taking the fragmentation of its handset OS variants into serious consideration and is only allowing certain hardware partners access to the Android 3.x Honeycomb OS.

Of course there may well be a summer of love in 2011 for Android 3.x Honeycomb based products as Asus can't build enough of its Eee Pad Transformer product to fulfil demand and the mighty Samsung are about to launch their hardware entry in to Honeycomb arena. Hopefully by the end of August the Android marketplace will be chock full of apps specifically designed to take advantage of what Honeycomb has to offer. Time will tell.....