The sweet taste of Honeycomb
By Chris Nuttall 2011年03月22日 Honeycomb,Android,iPad,Xoom,iPhone,Galaxy Tab,iPad 2

There are phoney wars and, in the iPad’s case, smart-phoney ones, where rival tablets resemble supersized phones and have failed to fight Apple head-on with an interface or screen size to match the pioneering device.

But hostilities are now officially under way, with the launch yesterday of Motorola’s Xoom – the first tablet to use Google’s “Honeycomb” Android 3.0 operating system and interface. It has been specifically designed for a much larger screen than the smartphones on which Android has been successfully challenging the iPhone.

The Xoom, available initially in the US through Verizon Wireless, will be followed swiftly by similar tablets that have been waiting on Honeycomb before launching.

Among the tablets looking to surpass the iPad’s looks, features and 9.7in screen size, Samsung is upsizing from its 7in Galaxy Tab with the Galaxy Tab 10.1 – as in 10.1in screen – the same size as the Xoom, while a Toshiba dev­ice at that size, but as-yet unnamed, is due out around April.

Honeycomb and the Xoom arrive just ahead of a new iteration of the iPad, expected to be unveiled next week. They have also been launched ahead of new interfaces and tablets from Research in Motion, with its BlackBerry PlayBook due in March, and Hewlett-Packard, whose TouchPad, based on Palm’s webOS, goes on sale in a few months.

I have been testing a Xoom and finding my way around the 3D “honeycomb cells” of the new Android in­terface. The look and feel is as expansive as a PC desktop, thanks to the larger screen size and four extra, virtual screens that can be accessed with panning gestures from side to side.

Various Honeycomb features give the desktop a “live” look. On my home screen, for example, instead of pressing an icon to access the Gmail app, I was able to set up a widget that serves as a window on my Gmail inbox. I can see the e-mails inside it and scroll through their subject lines in the window without opening Gmail itself. I can do the same with appointments in a Calendar widget’s window.

Another new graphical feature is Honeycomb’s “stacks” – small, overlapping windows that can be scrolled through manually or automatically. A You­Tube stack reveals the latest popular videos one by one, or a stack of book covers allows me to see with a few strokes what is in my Google Books digital library.

Honeycomb also betters the iPad’s pop-up push notifications and alerts with richer onscreen notifications – such as faces of friends appearing alongside their instant messages.

It eschews physical buttons apart from on-off and volume on the Xoom. There are touch-enabled Back and Home icons on the screen and a new Android icon brings up images of the last five apps used, for easy switching between activities.

A powerful graphics engine, Renderscript, enables impressive animations in the interface – the You­Tube app has a large wall of videos to choose from, the Books app has similarly elegant page turns to the iPad’s service, and books and music can be chosen from moving carousels of artwork.

Video games performed well and movies looked good on the Xoom’s large screen. I had good results with the 5Mp rear camera, which also takes HD videos and incorporates an im­proved app for tweaking settings and applying effects; an included movie-editing app, however, was basic and less intuitive. A front-facing camera allowed video calls using Google Talk.

Google also surpasses Apple with Honeycomb’s cloud connectivity and syncing – a book I was reading on the Xoom opened at the same page when I moved to reading iton my smartphone, while an app chosen for the Xoom on the Android Market website on my PC appeared on the tablet a few seconds later. Apple still requires its devices to be tethered to computers running iTunes to achieve this kind of synchronicity.

However, Honeycomb’s software lacks the movie and music service offered by iTunes, and the new operating system lacks, for now, the compelling be­spoke apps of the iPad – 60,000 already designed just for its screen.

The Xoom, in being rushed out to get ahead of Honeycomb rivals and iPad 2, is also missing some features: Verizon’s 4G capability, which will come later with an upgrade, and the ability to play video and games based on Adobe’s popular Flash software. The latest Flash 10.2 software should be ready for the Xoom when it makes its European debut shortly.

The Xoom sets a new standard with its dual-core processor, high-quality screen and innovative interface. But it is a standard that can easily be mat­ched by rivals in the coming months and the challenge for this next generation of Android tablets is to differentiate themselves from each other.

This may be done on price, brand strength, quality of screen and the odd gimmick – such as LG’s introduction of 3D cameras on the Optimus Pad (G-Slate in the US).

Buyers will soon be spoilt for choice and their excitement could turn to ennui. But the level of innovation taking place and activity among app developers sounds like a prescription for consumers to keep taking the tablets, in increasing numbers, for the foreseeable future.