Showing posts with label tablet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tablet. Show all posts

Monday, May 23, 2011

Android 3.0 Honeycomb

The time for needless spending is at hand and today my shifty tricky eyes have landed upon the new tablets coming out from Android. I've been following their products since Froyo, as an alternative for jumping on the iPhone/AT&T bandwagon. For those who don't know, Android names each following product after each letter of the alphabet and the name of a dessert. With Gingerbread out, we have 19 more platforms to go before we see what comes after "Z". But enough about this, let's check it out!

New UI

Take a look at that! Their first UI design meant specifically for larger screened tablets with vibrant colors and 3D experiences. Building upon the idea of Systems Bar from other operating systems, Android decided what works, works. They put in one themselves for notifications, systems status, and soft navigation. The Action Bar, located at the top, is meant for navigation, widgets, and context menus, depending on the app that is opened.


Customizable Home screens are back with more widgets you can shake a stick at. They did offer better visibility with visual cues and drop shadows, but most of it is the same ol' customizations (not necessarily a bad thing mind you) with widgets, apps, and wallpapers. along with a fancy new universal search bar. It will go through all of your apps, contacts, media files, web content, etc.


A nice strength the Android tablets are emphasizing is their multitasking ability. Something similar to the Mac's visual windows of applications running, you can use the Recent Apps list in the System Bar. Good call on their part and definitely useful for when you're trying to do more than one thing at at a time.

That's all I'll get into at the moment, but there definitely are more features such as a redesigned keyboard, improved copy and paste, new connectivity options, and an updated set of standard apps.


Definitely something worth considering for those who have needed to update their laptop for the past five years. I know I've been!