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. 

In Defense of the New Nook

By Aaron Ting

Barnes & Noble announced a new Nook reading device this week, featuring a full-color 7" LCD display and a slick touch-optimized interface built on top of Google's Android OS. Tech journalists and bloggers from all corners of the interwebs pounced on it immediately, all-but-declaring the device dead on arrival.

Sorry, but most of them are forming irrational, idiotic arguments. Their reasoning goes like this:

1) Ditching the first Nook's E-Ink display was a mistake because true reading enthusiasts prefer E-Ink displays. Amazon's Kindle is proof of this.

2) Adopting a color LCD display was a mistake because it places the Nook in competition with Apple's iPad and all the other touchscreen tablet computers on the market.

The problem with a lot of these journalists is that they're so immersed in the fringe of bleeding-edge technology news that they most often evaluate the merit of products based on technical offerings like their RAM or pixel density. It's utterly amazing to me how often they fail to consider consumer mentality and the product's actual position relative to its competitors. 

It's the reason most tech bloggers in 2003 failed to predict just how decisively the Nintendo DS would defeat the Sony PSP. On paper, the PSP should have been a clear winner. The PSP was a much more powerful device with a larger high-res display, sophisticated multimedia functionality, and a more trustworthy brand on the box. The popular opinion was that Nintendo had lost its mind; it was crazy to be putting out such a simple, underpowered handheld to compete against a multimedia powerhouse like the PSP. Fast forward, and the DS has outsold the PSP by nearly 3-to-1. How is that possible? Because unlike these incompetent enthusiasts (myself included), Nintendo wasn't counting RAM or clocking processor speed - they were paying attention to what consumers would actually buy. 

This is the problem with how many journalists are approaching the new Nook. They're forming irrational conclusions that completely disregard actual consumer demand.

E-Ink is a great technology, and the Kindle is an awesome device. But there is a general consensus forming among all the major technology players that black-and-white E-Ink reading devices are not interesting to consumers. Apple and HP have mentioned in the past that they looked at E-Ink and determined that consumers would want a more versatile, full-color device. This year, several companies have announced that they're already pulling out of the E-Ink reader market because they haven't been able to generate a viable business. Yes, Amazon is doing great in the dedicated e-reader market. No one's denying that. So what is B&N doing? They're withdrawing from a dying E-Ink market in which there is already a dominant competitor. That's stupid? No...that's actually good business sense.

They also weren't stupid to give the Nook a full-color LCD. So what if it's basically a tablet computer in a different form factor? We're getting to the point where every slate-shaped object is a tablet PC in a different form factor - regardless of whether it's a Kindle or an iPad. The question should be whether people want it, and whether it has better competitors.

This new Nook doesn't really have a good competitor right now. What is the new Nook doing? It's a $250 reading-optimized, full-color tablet with a web browser, apps, and a large digital book store. It's half the size and half the price of an iPad. It's like comparing a Moleskine-size notebook to large spiral notebook - both of these form factors are going to co-exist because they exist for different purposes and don't compete with each other.

And where are all these other competitors? It's not competing with the black-and-white E-Ink Kindle - Kindle fanboys are constantly happy to point this out. Its closest rival is the upcoming $400 Samsung Galaxy Tab, a 7" Android tablet that [so far] will only be sold with a two-year data contract from a cell phone carrier. Even if you want to call them rivals, I'm betting on whatever product doesn't force you to sign another contract with AT&T. 

Bottom line, the Nook is aimed at people who are looking at all these touchscreen devices and want to be able read books, listen to music, and occasionally browse the web - but don't want to cough up $500 or would rather carry something the size of a Moleskine than a spiral notebook. It's naive to think those people don't exist. I know it because after using an iPad for five months, I'm one of them. 

Sure, the NOOKcolor might still fail. But if it does, it won't fail because it isn't powerful enough or doesn't offer enough features to compete against its rivals - there are no other rivals yet. And unlike a certain writer at CrunchGear, I'll play with one for a while before I decide whether it has a place in the market.

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