First taste of Honeycomb: Android 3.0 user interface preview | Hacker News Reader

First taste of Honeycomb: Android 3.0 user interface preview

arstechnica.com

13 pointssolipsist14 comments

It looks very "geeky," I'm not sure the average use will appreciate this more than the iPad's UI.

This looks horribly complicated.

Google is honestly just terrible at UI design -- I'm not even an apple fanatic and it's still blatantly obvious.

I'm sorry but this looks similar to the iPad. I feel like Android has always been playing catch up, trying to create an iPhone look alike. Don't get me wrong, I would get a Droid over an iPhone anyday, but Google's UI team needs to come up with some original ideas. WP7 has made a valiant effort with its metro interface and really differentiated itself from all the other smartphones out there.

The only similarity to the iPad I see is that it's a large screen that you touch to interact with. The nav bar, multitasking, notifications, widgets, theme, and app styles are all pretty unique. Well, the Gmail app looks pretty similar to the iPad's, but I'm assuming they're not going to change much there since it's their own product.

It does look like it needs a bit more designer influence and less engineers doing UI work though. Polish has always been the strong point of Apple products, and that's really the area I'd like to see Google play catch-up on.

That being said, I'm pretty excited for the future of Tablet devices. The iPhone, Android, and WP7 handsets wouldn't be half the products they are today without the competition from one another, so Android Tablets can only mean good things for this market.

Oh I totally agree. My comment was more of a rant about Android in general; I should've been a bit more clear about that :) The Gmail app was the one that inspired me to comment

Android's programming model is also completely different to iOS's, taking a reusable component approach which, in my opinion, is much better.

What's not reusable in iOS? For simpler apps you can just take the same views you use for iPhone and pass them to be managed by UISplitViewController on iPad, and basically that's it.

Reusable in the component sense. On Android you can use intents to let apps work together, you can get one app to manage your podcasts, and another app to play them at the speed you want. So you don't need to have the ability to adjust the playback speed in your podcast app. Truly component-oriented.

I'm still very interested to see how Android 3.0 will scale down to a phone interface. As it stands, the new version seems to fragment the Android ecosystem even more than hardware vendors have done.

I'm sure that there are more under the hood changes that will benefit smaller form factors, but I too want new features and a more optimized interface for my Android phone.

It'll scale down just fine. Tablet size devices will see the new launcher layout. Phones will most likely see the current (Gingerbread) launcher layout. Check these screenshots of the Honeycomb SDK booting into a Nexus1 size emulator: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=10942783&...

I thought that the normal launcher didn't load on the phone emulator, which is why they launched Launcher+. And Launcher+ is just going to use the same experience that it has on Froyo, Gingerbread, etc devices. So we can't actually see any screenshots of the Honeycomb Launcher. Correct?

Correct. Google can fix the stock launcher in one of two ways: retain the old layout and just fix the bugs which prevent usage right now or come up with something new. Since the focus of Honeycomb is tablets, I am guessing they'll go with the former option.

I know 3.0 was supposed to be the first version truly tailored/prepared for tablets, but from this I can't really see many new features which would be useful on smaller devices like phones.

Hopefully there are some improvements down in the base-system which can bubble up and make the system and applications better as well.

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