Why Android 'Honeycomb' Matters

The 2011 Consumer Electronics Show was packed with a number of tasty gadget announcements last week, but the biggest news came courtesy of Google at Motorola's press event. Android 3.0 (codenamed 'Honeycomb') has finally been unveiled, and it's headed straight for smartphones and tablets in March. 

One of my biggest complaints about the Android OS has been the lack of a consistent user-interface design and an over-reliance on hidden menus to reveal basic functionalities. I'd heard last year that Palm's Matias Duarte (an industry veteran in mobile UI design) jumped ship to Google, and I was very interested to see when Duarte's work would manifest itself in Android's user experience. The results of months of UI development can be seen in Google's preview of Honeycomb.

For starters, there's a brand new art direction coming to Android; with Honeycomb, we can see a clear shift to a futuristic, 'authentically digital' aesthetic, reminiscent of the futuristic art design in the new Tron: Legacy film. In fact, the new gesture action for unlocking a Honeycomb device involves a glowing, Tron-like circle in the center of the screen.  

Current Android phones and tablets rely on physical buttons that are fixed into the hardware - Home, Search, Back, and Menu. In a few months, we'll start to see some devices do away with those hardware buttons, as Honeycomb will have a Windows-like 'taskbar' with Home, Back, and Menu buttons displayed on the touchscreen. 

The tablet build of Honeycomb will also come with a new dedicated Gmail widget, as well as a spruced-up calendar view that will let you scroll through calendar events from the home screen. Oh yeah, and there's also a sexy new 3D panoramic Youtube app, a powerful new Chrome-like web browser, an improved touchscreen keyboard, Gtalk-integrated video chat, and an incredibly elegant multitasking solution that will allow users to see what apps are running at all times. 

A slick new way to surf Youtube

Bottom line, Honeycomb looks stunning. While it's currently unknown as to how many of the new improvements will make it into the phone version of Honeycomb, it's very clear that Google's put a lot of work into making Android a more consumer-friendly OS that will scale beautifully to a variety of tablet screen sizes. The fact that Honeycomb will enable electronics makers to put out actually-good tablets with very competitive prices is an incredibly exciting prospect; based on what was shown by the various makers at CES, 2011 is going to see a massive armada of iPad-hunting Honeycomb tablets. 

Somebody needs to port Starcraft onto one of these. I'm dead serious - somebody do this before I storm the offices of Blizzard with a briefcase full of stolen cash.