We take a look inside Android Honeycomb 3.0
Honeycomb upgraded to Linux kernel 2.6.36. The most obvious change for
this tablet build stares you in the face straight away, it features a
unique ‘holographic' user interface optimised for large-scale screens. Android's
iconic notification bar has changed slightly, it's now a more versatile
‘System Bar' in the bottom right. Not only does it display
notifications but you also get all your system information including
date, time, connectivity and so on. The notifications are particularly
well handled - a single tap pops the note up and a second tap takes you
to the relevant app.
The System Bar does extend to the left-hand side of the screen too,
but it's here where you get three contextual buttons for ‘Back', ‘Home'
and ‘Recent Apps'. The latter is an updated take on Android's
multi-tasking and allows you to see screen previews of running apps as
well as enabling fast switching between them.
Screen customisation works the same as previous Android builds, a
long press on an app shortcut lets you move it around the screen, or
slide it into adjacent screens. However, things have been made a little
more fluid thanks to a more thorough customisation screen, toggle-able
with a little plus icon in the top-right. Here you get a zoomed out view
of all available homescreens and can drag and drop widgets and
shortcuts anywhere you like. It's much less fiddly if you're trying to
set up the whole device with some kind of continuous organisational
theme.
The interface has been reworked with the larger screen space in mind
and it feels highly intuitive to use. Many of the native apps have also
been tweaked for bigger displays including the Google suite apps such as
Gmail and the Google Calendar app.
The browser is a big improvement on its predecessors, even if
previous versions were incrementally faster it was never really
noticeable until now, and it really is quick. It's also helped by added
functionality - for the first time you've got tabbed browsing and
although Android has had swipe scrolling and pinch zoom for some time
it's now silky smooth. Again, Flash support isn't new for Android but
it's very well handled this time round.
Although Froyo and Gingerbread went some way to making the Android
touch keyboard much more user friendly it hasn't been ignored in this
version either. It's much more streamlined and just as snappy as
Gingerbread's, and also benefits greatly from the larger-scale 10-inch
screen tablets in terms of usability, where you can use it more or less
like a real keyboard quite successfully.
Google Talk has also been upgraded, so not only does it allow instant messaging and VoIP chat but if your tablet supports it you can use it for video calls.
Honeycomb features improved hardware acceleration support including
OpenGL graphics acceleration and a tailor-made Renderscript 3D graphics
engine. Also added is support for multi-core processors.
We take a look inside Android 3.1 Honeycomb
Version 3.1 of Honeycomb tweaked the UI further and added support for
USB devices. Interface changes included an expansion of the Recent Apps
tab and the ability to resize widgets.
Additional support was added for external keyboards and other
peripherals such as gamepads. Audio playback received some attention
with support for FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec).
Wi-Fi
was improved thanks to a modified lock, meaning when the screen turns
off you no longer take a hit on Wi-Fi connection quality, so if you want
to walk away from your tablet while it downloads something it's now
much more plausible.
We take a look inside Android Honeycomb 3.2
Version 3.2 of Android
Honeycomb was a general tune-up, optimising Honeycomb's hardware
capabilities so it now performs better on a wider variety of tablets.
App access to SD cards was also enhanced and a compatibility display
mode was added so that apps which haven't been designed for large
screens can still run reasonably well.
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