Android Honeycomb Born Too Early

adeelarshad82 writes "This year's Mobile World Congress was the stage for dozens of new tablets. Unfortunately, Android Honeycomb tablets lacked presence; amongst the top Android tablets demonstrated at the show, only the Motorola Xoom was running Honeycomb, whereas others were running either Android 2.3 or older versions. Moreover, most of the top apps announced for the OS were not new, just reworked. Gigaom may believe that Honeycomb tablets will be iPad's true competition, but progress has been slow, in my opinion. Honeycomb was born too early, primarily out pressure from the iPad getting a one year headstart in the tablet market."

Not too early.

[teh31337one]

amongst the top Android tablets demonstrated at the show, only the Motorola Xoom was running Honeycomb, whereas others were running either Android 2.3 or older versions.

Hmm, we had the Galaxy Tab 10.1, and LG G-pad too. They both had Honeycomb.

whereas others were running either Android 2.3 or older versions

Considering Google haven't released the source code for Honeycomb yet, I'm not surprised others didn't have Honeycomb.

How did this get through?

[Qwavel]

As far as I can tell, the only evidence to support adeelaershad82's conclusion that Android was "born too early" is that the top apps are not new. To my surprise, none of the links given really backup or explain his this thesis.

So, at launch, Honeycomb will not have very many tablet-specific apps, so early adopters will be stuck mostly with regular Android apps. Wow! Big surprise.

If this is the best attack on Android they can come up with then Honeycomb must be pretty good.

Uninformed OMG!!!!

[JAlexoi]

At MWC 2011 the following new tablets were presented:

• Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (Honeycomb)
• LG Optimus Pad (Honeycomb)
• Huawei IDEOS S7 (Froyo)
• HTC Flyer (Gingerbread)

Huawei and HTC devices didn't have Honeycomb on them. HTC said that Flyer would get Honeycomb at at lunch or right after launch.
In essence, there are 5 new tablets(Moto XOOM) on the scene. With 60%(3/5) of them on Honecomb!
If you add Galaxy Tab, then it drops to 50%.


The Honeycomb Born Too Early is an overstatement at this point.

Re:"Too Early"

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I'm pretty happy with my G-Tablet running a custom TnT-Lite ROM (well, "custom" in the sense that it uncustomized all the crap that Viewsonic put in the OS). The surprising thing for me was that Dolphin HD was the main app I find myself using on it... in preference to all of the crappy app-ified versions of several services. Flash videos and stuff work great, much better than my eeePC (probably due to the nVidia stuff).

Here's my delima which probably mirror others. I'd like to have a tablet PC to take with me on a very long (more than 24 hours from the first plane to the last plane) flight itinerary. I can get a Viewsonic gTablet 10.1 for $350, spend an afternoon installing one of the xda custom ROMs and get a crippled experience in exchange for getting a 2.2 version of Android working on an otherwise fine piece of hardware (WTF Viewsonic?). Or I can spend a $100 more and get an iPad (that may soon be replaced with iPad2) but works out of the box with all the apps that would keep me entertained and somewhat productive until I land and able to use my laptop.

I'd like to play with an Android tablet, since I have an Android phone *but* my time is worth more than the $100 I'd save. So I wait...