| Android 3.0 Honeycomb emulator has traces of smartphone support |
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| Wednesday, 12 January 2011 | |
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Thought Honeycomb was only for tablets? Nicely, it is not! Positively, tablets are perhaps Google's primary thrust with the release, however we've been able to dig up sufficient proof in the preview SDK's emulator launched yesterday to counsel that these guys are nonetheless keeping their eyes on the smartphone prize. Here is the way it works: the emulator may be set to load at an arbitrary display resolution. By default, that's WXGA, 1280 x 768 -- excellent for tablets, however clearly a wee bit large for even the biggest smartphones. Well, it seems that setting the emulator to WVGA (such as you may discover on a modern mid- to high-end smartphone) triggers a reasonably different shell UI that lacks most of the whiz-bang home display stuff Google's shown on the Honeycomb tablets. The truth is, the default launcher crashes out completely, which implies that you must install a alternative (Launcher Professional works properly) simply to play around. When you get in, it's pretty uncooked, but you immediately discover that the emulator's got some traces of smartphone support. Notably, the standing bar reverts to a more smartphone-friendly kind, albeit one with pre-Gingerbread background coloration and incorrectly-inverted font colors. The lock screen (pictured above) is back to its previous kind, not the webOS-esque circular lock within the Honeycomb pill UI. The browser -- which has been completely revamped in Honeycomb -- works, though with out seen tabs; Google might be considering that they'd take up an excessive amount of real estate on a screen this small. Again, you possibly can't glean much here, but it's interesting primarily as a result of the emulator is aware of to revert to a smartphone UI structure at the lower decision -- a potential signal that Honeycomb will probably be a true dual-mode, dual-goal platform from day one. And even if it is not, it appears to be like like they're setting themselves up for a two-UI strategy down the road.  |
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