Gadgetory

hey I'm Donald L for cnet com we're at Google's Android Honeycomb event there's some Motorola Xoom tablets inside that are running honeycomb I'm going to go inside and check it out see what honeycomb can do I saw this at CES but you can actually touch her play around of it I just great to see that there's a notification window and that's now kind of the general setting signing at the bottom two so you don't have to dive into the actual full settings menu mystical to you're getting a to pain view of everything exactly so this is again using the concept of fragments which break up the screen into multiple pieces so you can jump between them here's another actual example if you jump in to manage applications you see that there's kind of almost complete from navigation that you get can flick through the income-tax applications just the storage and krypton so navigation is fully it's fully been rethought this music interface is a new interface for you guys to correct sort of you know having the four buttons and things got another tabs but you have this kind of drop side navigation universe but really it's it's kind of again rethought in terms of how does this work in a larger space that's nice so the interesting thing with notification is actually this is something that's changed in the past the notification was always there but now if you press home for example another app the notification appears in the bottom there so you yep hey con they've got your quick controls for play pause and skip the Menu key has become part of this top application bar and some of them are just more important than others so we decided that throw up here that will put them to front you know different immediately visible on the screen app and the secondary items that's kind of what are what's relegated to this like that secondary menu right so this is kind of where the menu button is gone it would be pretty and so on all the all the google mobile sweet kind of apps like the gmail Maps calendar is another example of a pregnant to the action bar so again you have striking on the right you have this kind of main pregnant and that action bar the menu items is there anything that you guys have done I mean obviously the keyboards a lot larger there's been some changes to the actual keyboard functionality like there's much down do things like that at the same time there's there's some other changes their kind of more minor cousin ah but the keyboard has had a big so that was Android Honeycomb on the Motorola Xoom I got to say first impressions the hardware is beautiful the screen is really responsive touch accuracy is really good the OS itself honeycomb on the tablet does a lot of stuff that Android hasn't done well historically on the tablet sized devices yet it's killer email web browsers really great the actual repositioning of apps and widgets on the screen and be able to drag down different UI elements and the repositioning of the settings down in the corner and the contextual menu buttons up in the top overall you can tell a lot of thoughts gone into it I'm really excited to see this into a formal cnet review hopefully soon for cnet com I'm Donald L coming to you from Google's Android Honeycomb