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Google Says Honeycomb Will Not Come To Smartphones
tekgoblin writes "Google has officially announced that Honeycomb will not be coming to Android based smartphones. Android 3.0 Honeycomb was specifically made for Tablets according to a Google spokesperson. Although, certain features that are present on Honeycomb will become available over time on Android smartphones. Google has not offered any information to what features will be ported over specifically."
On the bright side, Honeycomb will come with disk-encryption capabilities built in.
They said the same basic thing about Tablets and the pre-Honeycomb versions of Android... ChromeOS was supposed to be for Tablets earlier on- and people went and did Tablets with 1.x and 2.x versions anyway to mostly good results. If there's not anything explicitly keeping it from being useful on phones, SOMEONE will do a phone with it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I guess that is because
Honeycomb is Big!
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!
It's not small!
No, No, No!
At launch the iPad was running a version of iOS (3.2) customized specifically for it, and this version never was released for the iPhone. Furthermore, when Apple released iOS 4, it wasn't compatible with the iPad. It was 7 months before they released 4.2 which was compatible with both. Google could very well be taking the same route here; getting things right on the tablet while continuing to advance the phones, and merging in a later release.
Looks like Google clarified what they said a bit (original source): http://www.bgr.com/2011/02/03/google-will-not-bring-honeycomb-to-smartphones/
The Director Engineering said as much to TechRadar two weeks ago, so I'm surprised this is news. http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/honeycomb-may-never-come-to-mobiles-922897 So Phones = 2.X, Tablets = 3.X, until Google reunite the number systems. According to the Dev blog post today, they're creating a Fragments API static library for use with phones going down to 1.6. http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/02/android-30-fragments-api.html so universal apps for tablets and phones can be coded.
no the article is wrong
i think the original article was written for pc magazine and has been rewritten on other sites.
http://www.bgr.com/2011/02/03/google-will-not-bring-honeycomb-to-smartphones/
UPDATE: It turns out there may have been a bit of confusion surrounding Kovacsâ(TM) comments at the Google event. Google reached out to clarify, supplying BGR with the following statement: âoeThe version of Honeycomb weâ(TM)ve shown is optimized for tablet form factors. All of the UI changes are the future of Android. Yesterdayâ(TM)s event focused on tablet form factors, which is where youâ(TM)ll first see Honeycomb.â
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For most users the answer is "Yes, these are the devices of the future of computing".
I bought my iPad about a year ago. By July I stopped carrying a laptop. I didn't need it anymore and once I was able to get printing from the iPad, it did everything I needed at home and 95% of what I needed at work. I still have to dive into code/troubleshoot technical problems at work, but even that is getting less often. I still have an iMac there. I bought one of those bluetooth keyboard cases from think geek over christmas, but before that I used a docking station at home and the wireless keyboard at the office.
But as far as email, word processing, spreadsheets, and even presentations go, I can do all of that on my iPad now. Even our SVN hosting has an iPad/iPhone app that I can check bug report status messages, assign tasks, etc.. If Barebones came out with BBEdit for iPad, I probably could get away with not even having a computer at work. (None of the work I do involves compiling anymore).
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