Google Android 3.0 (Honeycomb)

Google's Honeycomb, also known as Android 3.0, is poised to become the standard tablet operating system for much of the world. That's not a statement about how good it is; it's the only OS being offered to a wide range of tablet manufacturers, so we're going to see dozens of Honeycomb tablets come to market in the coming months.

As it is now, Honeycomb is an emptier vessel than its major competitors, Apple's iOS 4.3 (4 stars), RIM's BlackBerry Tablet OS (3 stars) and HP's upcoming version of WebOS for tablets. Honeycomb's extreme configurability demands more of users, but it can pay off with a tablet that's designed for your needs in a way no other OS can match. The OS is severely weak on third-party apps, though, which may be a brake on Honeycomb tablet sales, at least for a while.

History and Devices
Honeycomb is poised to appear on more tablets than any other OS because of Google's strategy of offering its OS to many different manufacturers. We've seen Honeycomb tablets from big mobile phone makers like LG, Motorola, and Samsung, but also from smaller firms like Anydata and from PC giants like Acer and Asus. This is a very different approach from competing tablet OS vendors Apple, RIM, and HP, who make their own hardware and keep the numbers down to one or two per year.

This version of Android isn't open source, at least not yet; Google seems to be doling it out only to partners it trusts, with a promise to open it up in the future. Once it becomes open source, expect dozens of cheap Honeycomb tablets to appear quickly.

Google swears there's no hardware requirement for Honeycomb, but the first round of devices have all been 8.9-inch or larger tablets with 1280-by-1024 screens and Nvidia Tegra 2 processors. Manufacturers tell us Honeycomb will also be available on 7- and 10-inch devices, on tablets with 1024-by-600 screens, and on HTC's upcoming EVO View 4G for Sprint, which has a 1.5GHz, single-core processor. So just as with Android phones, we're likely to see a wide variation in Honeycomb tablet capabilities.

Honeycomb is considered Android 3.0, with most features in common with Android phones. Honeycomb won't run on small-screen devices, Google has said, but the tablet and phone experiences may be brought together in the next version of Android, which is code named "Ice Cream" and expected later this year.

The upgrade path for Honeycomb tablets is unclear. While all the Honeycomb tablets so far have had the same Google user experience, which would in theory make software upgrades easy, Google and its manufacturers don't have a strong history of providing timely upgrades on Android phones, so we're wary of what will happen with these tablets.

Just like other versions of Android, Honeycomb is a modern Linux-based OS which uses the Dalvik virtual machine to run code similar to Java apps. It supports multitasking and just-in-time compilation, and generally has good memory management; I didn't run out of memory when trying to run multiple apps during my tests. Stability, on the other hand, was a concern. While my test Honeycomb devices, a T-Mobile G-Slate (3.5 stars) and a Motorola Xoom (3.5 stars), didn't crash while I was testing them, they frequently threw up errors asking me to close misbehaving background apps.

Home Screens
Unlike Android phones, all Honeycomb tablets so far have the same user interface. They have different built-in apps depending on their wireless carrier and manufacturer, though, and they may also have different optional widgets that consumers can choose to add or remove on home screens. The first Honeycomb "skins," changing the UI and home screens, are poised to arrive this summer from Samsung and HTC.

Honeycomb tablets come with five, user-configurable home screens. Typically, the central home screen has some app icons preloaded; the others are blank. This can be a very spare user interface for newbies, but Google intends you to decorate it as you like.

This is Honeycomb's strength and its weakness. There's an overwhelming number of elements you can add to a Honeycomb screen. You can add widgets, many of which are live, like a little box showing your most recent e-mail messages, or the weather. Third-party apps add widget options as well, such as news headlines or media players. You can add links to apps, Web bookmarks, individual contacts, shortcuts to settings screens, or even music playlists. No other tablet OS comes anywhere close in terms of configurability. You can make a Honeycomb tablet look unique to an extent no Apple tablet can match. But until you spend time doing it, and until more third-party developers come out with apps and widgets for Honeycomb tablets, you'll have a lot of blank screens.

On a top bar, above the home screen, there's a Google search bar, a voice-commands button, and buttons to add widgets and open the "apps drawer." The apps drawer looks like the home screen of a BlackBerry or iOS tablet: it's the list of apps. It's collected into two groups, all apps and "My Apps," which is the programs you've downloaded. There's no support for folders or custom groups. (You can create groups by arranging icons on your custom home screens.)

Just like on Android phones, that search bar is a universal search, giving you results both from the Web and from within your device. That's a great advantage of Android, and one way Google is ahead of Apple right now.

Along the bottom of the screen are virtual Back and Home buttons, a button that pops up a list of most recently used apps (with great-looking thumbnails), various notifications and a digital clock that, when touched, pops up a settings panel and list of notifications.

Notification strategy here is better than other tablet OSes. Any app running in the background can notify you of news at any time, through an icon in the bottom bar. The notifications aren't annoying, they don't interrupt what you're doing and they can be dismissed, unlike on an iPad.

Features and Performance
Honeycomb hits all the basic apps you'd expect from a tablet. The built-in contact, calendar, and e-mail apps look good, especially the calendar app, which supports pinch-to-zoom and displays entries from different calendars in different colors. All the PIM apps use the now-standard tablet method of having an index pane on one side of the screen, and more detailed information on the other side.

Honeycomb's Web browser uses the same WebKit core that is standard on high-end mobile devices nowadays, but it has a big problem. Many major sites seem to see it as a cell-phone browser, delivering low-quality, text-only pages that aren't ideal for tablet-size screens. In my tests, Expedia.com and RadioShack.com, for instance, turned up a stripped down version in Honeycomb. I didn't have that problem with the iPad or BlackBerry Playbook.

In terms of performance, the browser supports Adobe Flash 10.2, a good thing in the long run, but at the moment, it's a buggy beta version. On an LG G-Slate, the browser was slower to load and render pages than either the PlayBook or the iPad. Of course, that may also be due to hardware differences.

Honeycomb makes an initial step towards merging multiple user accounts, but doesn't go far enough. Right now, the OS supports Microsoft Exchange contacts, calendar, and e-mail; Google for the same functions; POP/IMAP e-mail and Twitter contacts. Many Android phones also support Facebook contacts and calendar, which would be a useful addition.

Media support is fine, with popular (non-DRM) audio and video formats supported. The music player shows album art and a Cover Flow-like 3D view. The video player is oddly named "Gallery" and makes you drill through thumbnails of mixed music and videos, but it plays most expected formats as well. XVID and DIVX support, on phones, were added by manufacturers rather than in the core Android OS, so keep an eye on specific device reviews if you need those file formats.

Other built-in apps include a calculator, the Google Books e-reader app, a desk clock, Google Maps with free GPS driving directions, YouTube, and Google Talk with video chat (but it only works with other Honeycomb tablets and PCs, for now), although software loads vary by device.

This being Android, one of the big advantages is that you can download a range of third-party Web browsers, music and video players. For instance, the Dolphin HD Web browser doesn't have the mobile-site-display problem, while the doubleTwist media player has a more-appealing interface than the Android Gallery. Third-parties can extend the Honeycomb touch keyboard, too, adding features like Swype or XT9 text-entry. Once more, Honeycomb is the most configurable mobile OS.

Third-Party Apps
Here's where Honeycomb falls flat on its face. At this writing, the selection of tablet-focused apps for Honeycomb is very slim. If you have a Honeycomb tablet, it difficult to discover new apps, and running Android phone apps isn't a good solution.

The Android Market is poorly designed for tablet users. The only obvious way to find tablet apps is in its "Featured for Tablets" section, and many of those apps don't seem to be designed for Honeycomb. Even then, when I checked, there are just 67 apps. Actively searching for keywords like "Honeycomb" helps turn up some more results, but it's a frustrating process. None of the several alternative app stores for Android focuses on tablets, either.

Even when you do specific searches, it's hard to find tablet apps. Searching for two of our favorite tablet apps, CNN and Weatherbug, it was unclear on the results screen which were for phones and which were for tablets. I had to tap through to specific app descriptions, and in CNN's case guess from a picture of a Motorola Xoom, which app was for tablets. This is a lousy user experience.

If you can track down a Honeycomb tablet app, they're good looking but often buggy. That CNN app, for instance, has HTML code stuck into some stories; two drawing apps I downloaded showed a noticeable delay between finger touches and graphic response. This isn't Google's fault, of course, but a more vibrant app market would lead to more competition and better apps.

Honeycomb is compatible with most, but not all Android phone apps. Apps which do low-level network tricks like starting an FTP server or running BitTorrent, for instance, fail. But even fully functional phone apps often just don't look good on larger tablets. Take the official Android Twitter app: It uses the big screen very poorly, with long, narrow rows of white space that were clearly designed to be cut off after a few inches. Google's approach is better than Apple's—unlike iPhone apps run on the iPad, fonts and graphics stay sharp here. But it's still not good enough.

The problem here isn't the SDK. Google's Honeycomb software developers' kit is very similar to its other Android kits, and developers have written more than 125,000 apps for Android phones. I think the problem is a mixture of confusion about how many Honeycomb tablets have sold, the difficulty of finding Honeycomb apps in the market, and Google not aggressively promoting Honeycomb app development.

It's not surprising that Apple's iOS offers a much wider selection of third-party apps, but it's a little shocking that you'll find many more apps for RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook tablet than for Honeycomb tablets.

Conclusions
Much more than BlackBerry Tablet OS, iOS, and WebOS, Google Android Honeycomb is what consumers and manufacturers make of it—and they haven't made enough of it yet. Compared with the rich, mature iOS tablet experience, a Honeycomb tablet feels like a big house without enough furniture. You want to set up the rooms, but you just can't find the chairs, and you don't have an IKEA catalog.

This all may change during 2011. Asus, HTC, and Samsung have ideas on how to fill those big, blank home screens. More Honeycomb tablets means a bigger audience for app developers. And if Google doesn't step up with a more functional app store, a third party like GetJar may fill in the blanks. That's the strength of Google's open approach; the platform could be helped, even saved, by players other than Google.

If you're considering a tablet, the Google Android Honeycomb OS looks like a strong choice for techier users who want to be able to configure their home screens to their liking. More basic users, or those interested in a wide selection of attractive third-party apps, should go with our Editor's Choice, iOS 4.3 on the iPad 2, or wait to see how HP's and RIM's alternatives develop.