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Google Handhelds

Google Unveils Android 'Honeycomb' Tablet 187

adeelarshad82 writes "Google Mobile Platform VP Andy Rubin unveiled the very first Android 'Honeycomb' tablet. While very few specs were released about the device, it is said to be a sleek, black, Motorola tablet that is roughly 10" and runs a NVidia dual core CPU. The device has a very clean homepage and the app page looked almost Apple iPad-like. In fact, the Gmail app looked almost exactly like Gmail on the iPad. According to Andy Rubin, Honeycomb should release some time next year, and most major OEMs planning on building Android tablets have expressed interest in using this version of the Android platform."
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Google Unveils Android 'Honeycomb' Tablet

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  • This is excellent news! I love that Google creates these devices that jumpstart the industry to doing their own versions. Great job, Google!
    • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

      by DavidinAla ( 639952 )
      How exactly is it "jumpstart[ing] the industry" to create a tablet that's trying hard to copy an iPad -- almost a year after the iPad came out and started selling millions and millions of units?
      • by Gilmoure ( 18428 )

        Dood! Slashdot 101:

        Apple = teh eeeeevil

        Google = teh not so eeeeevil

        MicroSoft = teh used to be eeeeevil but now mostly incompetent run by chair-shaped-poop throwing monkeys.

  • Please. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pojut ( 1027544 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @12:34PM (#34474972) Homepage

    Give me these four things, and I'll buy it in a second:

    1. Wireless-N
    2. Built-in Bluetooth (think external controller used for emulators and games.)
    3. SDHC card slot
    4. At least one standard USB slot (preferably USB 3.0, but even 2.0 would be fine...just so long as it's a standard port without any proprietary nonsense.)

    For the love of Jim Darkmagic, PLEASE FREAKIN' INCLUDE THESE FOUR THINGS.

    • 5. Display port.

      • by Pojut ( 1027544 )

        That would be quite welcome, but if ditching the display port meant gaining a USB port (or even an additional one) or an SDHC slot, I would gladly trade it away.

        Naturally, this is based on my own plans for it, so YMMV with that.

        • That would be quite welcome, but if ditching the display port meant gaining a USB port (or even an additional one) or an SDHC slot, I would gladly trade it away.

          My little HSG X5A [jiongtang.com] (a 7" tablet running Eclair) has:

          1. One full size USB port
          2. One mini-size USB port
          3. One mini-size HDMI port
          4. One 3.5mm audio jack
          5. One SDHC card slot

          Items 1 through 4 live on one short end of the device (along with the power jack and the power button); the SDHC slot is on one of the long sides. The other short side and the other long side are empty. There's plenty of room on a 7" - and thus more than enough room on a 10" - for your entire wish list of connectivity.

    • Re:Please. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by wiredog ( 43288 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @12:45PM (#34475186) Journal

      Also, a WiFi only version so it doesn't cost $500.

      • that nails the problem. a lot of folks like the ipad but are put off by the price. if it was replacing my phone or my laptop i wouldn't mind spending $700 for it, but a tablet doesn't replace anything. it's an extra gadget. it won't enable you to do without owning a phone or a laptop. for me and i think a lot of others, that means a tablet needs to be much cheaper.

        send in the clones. the problem there is that they are all about the same price as an ipad (counting out the chinese knockoffs). consumers like m

        • Been playing with one. 3/4ths as good as an iPad (twice as good in some respects...) at half the price.

          • nook color doesn't have android market support right? that's a problem for most of the cheaper android tablets. i understand you can get it through hacking / rooting but that's not going to happen for most of the devices.

            • by Pojut ( 1027544 )

              The Nook Color is supposed to be an extremely capable device once it's rooted. Considering the support the original Nook had (and continues to have) in the homebrew community, I have high hopes for the Nook Color.

              Besides, isn't the point of buying an Android device being able to muck around with it? If you want an "out of the box" experience, you might as well go iDevice.

              • by Pojut ( 1027544 )

                Besides, isn't mucking around with it the motivation behind buying an Android device?

                Fixed...sorry about that folks. I'm fully aware that you can "muck around" with an iDevice, but the wording of my previous post seemed to ignore that.

        • it won't enable you to do without owning a phone or a laptop.

          It most certainly could replace a phone (skype, other voip apps allow this, even if it's not the most convenient form factor for somebody who walks around a lot), and unless you do huge amounts of text input via keyboard, it could easily replace a laptop too. You can browse the web, send emails, instant message, listen to / watch audio/video, read books, play games... for many people, that's pretty much what their laptop gets used for. If your u

    • by Kamots ( 321174 )

      My Nexus 1 has all that, so I'd imagine that it'd be on a tablet as well.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      I hope at least one of those ISN'T included so I can be modded insightful for bitching about it on every Android story.

      • by Pojut ( 1027544 )

        I can see your point...after being modded at +5 for discussing your choice of activity involving butts, there's nowhere to go but up! :)

    • Judging by the summary, it seems you outlined the early prototype, but they had to make some alterations.

      They dropped the Wirless for sleek.
      They couldn't have bluetooth while being black
      They were going to have an SDHC card slot, but decided to drop it to fit the 10-inch form factor.
      They decided that if they didn't include a USB slot, they could bump it up to a NVidia dual core CPU.

      I hope you are still willing to buy.

    • by EdZ ( 755139 )
      At the top of my list:
      - A decent screen.
      The entire device is basically a display with a SOC and a battery glued to the back, but it's the component that always seems to get the short end of the stick. 1024x600 TN panels? What the hell 99% of tablet manufacturers!
      • Yeah, I'm not getting one of these things until the pixel density jumps up a fair bit... 1024xanything is just absurd for a device like this. At an absolute bare minimum, 1366x768 (or 1366x1024, for a 4x3-form-factor device) IPS seems like a no-brainer.

    • Re:Please. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Fnkmaster ( 89084 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @01:05PM (#34475510)

      The Viewsonic G Tablet has all those things, and can be purchased now for less than $400 at Sears or Staples in the US. The Advent Vega is very similar over in the UK, with much better stock software.

      The G Tab supports Wireless N (I haven't tested this personally, I just have 802.11b/g, but it supposedly does), it has built-in bluetooth, it has an SD slot that supports SDHC cards, and it has a standard USB port (well, USB-mini, but totally standard) that supports USB host mode.

      The only issues with it are the out-of-the-box software completely sucks and is dog slow, you need to be comfortable flashing your own ROMs from XDA Developers to get much value out of it at this point, and to do a tiny bit of hacking to get the Market working properly. And the LCD screen is just not as nice as the IPS screen on the iPad, for example, and that's not a software-fixable issue.

      I'm running the VEGAn ROM on it right now, which is a port of the Advent Vega software, and it's running great with Froyo. Things will only get better when Gingerbread and Honeycomb are here.

      I'm hopeful the next generation of Tegra 2 tablets will be made with better LCD screens. That's what's really necessary to make an iPad-beating device right now.

      Ironically, the diversity of Android devices and screen resolutions mean that quite a bit of the existing Android apps in Google's Market run much better on the G Tab than iPhone software ran on the iPad at its release.

      • The only issues with it are the out-of-the-box software completely sucks and is dog slow, you need to be comfortable flashing your own ROMs from XDA Developers to get much value out of it at this point, and to do a tiny bit of hacking to get the Market working properly.

        Great! I'll tell my mom. She's sure to be interesting it getting one. Sounds just up her alley.

    • by Timmmm ( 636430 )

      2 is in every android phone, and 3 is in nearly all of them.

      • by tepples ( 727027 )

        2 is in every android phone

        But I don't want a phone. Phones cost $500-$600 because they're priced with the expectation that a carrier will subsidize the purchase by jacking up the price for service.

        • by Timmmm ( 636430 )

          Well, no. They cost the same as bigger tablets because small electronics are expensive. Same reason laptops are more expensive than desktops.

          The carrier 'subsidy' trickery just lets them sell more.

          • by tepples ( 727027 )

            Well, no. They cost the same as bigger tablets because small electronics are expensive. Same reason laptops are more expensive than desktops.

            If an Android tablet is expensive because the miniaturized computer hardware inside is expensive, then how does Apple make money selling its 3.5" iOS tablet [google.com] for $229?

    • by mrops ( 927562 )

      ummmmm.... get the archos

      • by tepples ( 727027 )

        ummmmm.... get the archos

        Any place where I can try Archos products? I tried Best Buy, but they don't have Archos 5 or Archos 43, and without having the device in front of me, I can't tell whether a device will have an unusably unresponsive touch screen and need to be mailed back for an 85% refund.

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      1. Wireless-N
      2. Built-in Bluetooth (think external controller used for emulators and games.)

      To be more correct, you want a/b/g/n, and not just b/g/n. a/b/g/n gets you N on both 2.4 and 5GHz, while b/g/n is just N on 2.4GHz. (the iPad has a/b/g/n - 2.4 and 5, iPhone 4 only b/g/n - 2.4 only). Saying N doesn't guarantee a 5GHz radio, and it's nice to use the less-crowded 5GHz spectrum and spare the 2.4GHz for everything else.

      Bluetooth is good too, but you need standardized OS support so apps have a unified API

    • There are a few of these on the market already. The Archos 70 [archos.com] has what you're looking for. There are other models that are differently sized so you even have the option there.

      Most of the chinese knock-offs are 802.11g but the newer tablets coming out now are 802.11N like the Archos.

  • Honeycomb's big, yeah, yeah yeah!\

    [with apologies to Post cereals and to Hermes from Futurama]

  • Apple-biased much? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by denzacar ( 181829 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @12:39PM (#34475054) Journal

    but the app page looked almost Apple iPad-like. Plus, when Rubin brought up the Gmail app, it looked almost exactly like Gmail on the iPad.

    Seriously? Gmail app looked a lot like a Gmail app - but on the iPad?
    Wow! How does that compare to the likeness to say... Gmail?

    • Really. You mean to tell me Apple hasn't sued Google for creating an app for Andriod that looks like the app they created for iPad?
      Nah, I'm sure their lawyers a looking into this at this very moment.
    • by Mabbo ( 1337229 )
      The Gmail "App" is just an HTML5/CSS3 website that gets returned when your user agent says you're an iPad. It's just clean and slick enough that people seem to assume it's some kind of app. Change your user agent, and load up gmail, see what happens.
  • video on engadget (Score:5, Informative)

    by slshwtw ( 1903272 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @12:43PM (#34475158)
    Engadget [engadget.com] has the video.
  • by dazedNconfuzed ( 154242 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @12:50PM (#34475282)

    In juxtaposition to the new Google tablet featuring "NVidia dual core CPU", just a few /. stories prior is a link to John Carmack opining "In the not-too-distant future, we're going to be seeing multicore on mobiles" in reference to gaming capabilities.

    Interesting times.

  • Developers are getting concerned about fragmentation of the Android platform. If users all have different versions, then it makes it hard to gets apps to those users.

    I think the solution is to encourage the hardware OEMs to allow people to flash new versions of Android themselves, or Google/OHA needs to work with them to get the newest versions on all the hardware as soon as possible.

    At least with my iPhone, I know I'm going to get all the iOS updates. If you buy an Android phone, there is a good chance you

  • Honeycomb's big! (Score:2, Redundant)

    by TheABomb ( 180342 )

    Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

  • by 0x537461746943 ( 781157 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @01:25PM (#34475826)
    The big advantage to the iPad for me is that it lasts all day on battery with just about constant usage. I know that it is always available if I need it without needing to find an outlet. I sometimes go 2 days without charging it. That nvidia dual core CPU I have a feeling will drain the batteries pretty quickly when something makes heavy use of it. I sure hope they put a big battery in it. If they do I would probably end up getting one. If it only lasts 5 hours on battery under medium use then it will be useless to me.
    • I have a feeling that the dual core CPU will cause the batteries to actually generate electricity. You'll be able to plug it into the wall and actually make you electrical meter go backward.
    • I have a Viewsonic G Tablet (a Tegra 2 tablet running Froyo) and I can leave the tablet on all day, browse the web intermittently throughout the day, watch a couple hours of video, listen to streaming music for a while, and still have charge left.

      In fact, it's been on the entire time since 10:00AM this morning, it's currently 2:30PM, I've been using it moderately (testing a new ROM out, browsing, downloading from Market, etc.) and I am reading 70% battery still.

      People on XDA Developer forums have confirmed

  • the app page looked almost Apple iPad-like. Infact the Gmail app looked almost exactly like Gmail on the iPad

    Uhh, that means the app looks GOOGLE like, since they MADE both apps... It was their choice - not Apple's - to make it look the way it looks. I guess tech writers have bought in to the whole "the world is Apple is the world" cult mentality after all...

  • I'd like to see this (finalized) OS in a 7" tablet. Anyone know if the Samsung Galaxy Tab will be upgradeable to 'Honeycomb'?

  • motorola has a habit of making android phones and then not keeping their oses up 2 date. not sure how other cell makes are, but this happens. Does it run stock android or does it have motobloat, er motoblur?

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