Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minute man from pocketnow.com Google recently released the honeycomb preview SDK which allows us to run the emulator and actually use honeycomb pocket now it doesn't cover tablets but we do cover smartphones of course so we want to talk about how honeycomb for tablets will kind of transcend into a new version of honeycomb for smartphones which we know is coming in 2011 there are some dramatic changes to the way that you're going to use your phone and the way that Android thinks things should be organized and it's pretty interesting we want to apologize for the portrait view here I know it's kind of difficult to see but you may have to turn your neck a little bit also we should know that the performance of this emulator is horrible but we wanted to give you the opportunity to take a look at some of our thoughts on how honeycomb will translate into smartphones so first a new unlock screen for better or for worse so we can slide over and bring it outside of the circle and we'll probably see this new unlock screen come to smartphones it's nothing too dramatic but it's it's pretty neat so a lot of things to talk about here first of all a new home screen manager currently an Android for smartphones it's a big pain in the butt having to move icons on the screen you can only do things one at a time if you've got a particular home screen full of icons you got to delete one of them before if you want to I should say if you want to kind of change the order of two icons on a full homescreen you're gonna have to delete one icon move the other one and add the other one back it is a mess but in honeycomb it's a completely different story we're going to tap and hold on the background here and we're going to be taken into the home screen manager and here's what it looks like so it kind of gives you some items and a view of your seven home screens or actually there's five in this case so what we can do from here is click and drag various widgets or app shortcuts from the tray down here up into the home screen so let's show you an example I'm going to swipe to the right so I can see all of the available widgets and this grooves you a nice visual view of the widgets instead of Android smartphone where you are sort of guessing at what things look like so we can sweat to the right or technically swipe up if you're looking at this video Watson landscape let's say we want to add the the photo frame here or the picture frame two-by-two to the center home screen so I'm going to tap and hold on it and what you're gonna see is the home screens turn green and we can slide up and again performance really is bad on the emulator and I'm going to release once we get a blown-up view here of the home screens I'm going to release in one of these locations it shows you where you can put the particular widget which is nice and we can drop it right there and it will apply now sometimes you'll get a red border when you do something that can't be done kind of strange that it's doing that because we're dropping a a reasonably sized widget and we got a force close here you're probably gonna see a lot of these through the demo so we just tried to add hey widget didn't work let's go to app shortcuts maybe we'll have better luck with that since they're a little bit lighter so if we tap app shortcut so we will get a list of all of the applications on your device of course you can do this now and Android for smartphones but it's not as pretty so we're gonna probably get this kind of interface coming up in honeycomb for smartphones let's say we want to put the browser icon on the second home screen let's see if I can actually make that happen I'm just going to drop it here on the Left home screen and it worked and you can see a live preview of what it looks like tapping on any of these blue tiles which represent your home screens will take you to that particular home screen we can also go over here to wallpapers which we can use to adjust the wallpapers so the big story and Android for honeycomb is there's a lot less digging through menus you know on your smart phone you get a lot of use out of the Menu key you're constantly digging into menus to do certain things in honeycomb it's going to be so much less of that in fact the menu button doesn't even exist like it does in the current version of Android for smartphones so here's wallpaper we can change the wallpaper or I'm going to go down here to where it says more and show you those other things that you can do such as added bookmark or contact an email account a particular setting to the home screens okay so let's jump into the home screens and look at what we have here so I'm going to actually click on it so this is the second home screen very simple I've got two shortcuts one for the browser one for the camera we'll talk about that more in a second we can swipe to the center home screen and we'll get a little animation all I've got here is a Google search so let's talk about more of the stuff you see on the screen I should mention that there are some awesome widgets coming to Honeycomb right now the built-in Android widgets you get for your smart phone are kind of boring if you've got an HTC device you have a lot more choices or a Motorola device a lot more choices Google's going to be providing some really high quality widgets right out of the box for honeycomb for smartphones so we've got these buttons along the bottom and obviously we've got a back button here which will take you to the previous screen we've got a home button and we've got this new button which is now your application switcher so if you're an Android on a smart phone and you want to switch between applications you tap and hold on the home button for about two seconds which is kind of annoying because there's a delay and you get your recently used programs so if we do that and honeycomb for smart phones we are going to get hopefully a little pop-up that shows us our most recently used apps that it's not showing anything now we'll come back to it's probably because we haven't opened any apps now because this these buttons take place on the bottom of the screen Android Honeycomb smartphones will not need to have hardware buttons paving the way for buttonless smartphones it's going to be great it's gonna give the OEMs a lot of flexibility and how they want to design their hardware now sliding down here we've got the time and our notification tray and honeycomb for smartphones is going to switch to the bottom of the screen makes a lot of sense because to kind of move your finger to the top of the screen and slide down the notification tray like you do right now in Android it's kind of cumbersome takes a lot of finger movement but here you can just tap on a particular notification I've actually got an email notification let's see how that looks and of course right here we get a little preview of our email notification so really neat way that they redesign notifications I've got my Gmail feeding into here right now and it's working quite well we can tap on the clock to get a little preview of sort of what time it is we can also see the notifications in one shot the battery percentage the date the time and our strength so that's new we can kind of click off there and it should fade away into the background now how do you get to X well now the app drawers at the top of the screen we're not so sure that the app drawer is going to be at the top of the screen when it comes time for android for smartphones because again you're reaching all the way to the top of your screen but maybe let's see how the app drawer looks on at least the tablet edition very simple listing of your programs you can toggle between all programs or downloaded programs and downloaded programs will probably be the ones that don't come stock on your device so I'm going to go back to all and let's dive into a few applications I have a feeling that a lot of these are gonna force closed on us but you know let's let's try we're gonna go into calculator probably the easiest to run application here and see how it looks how it's been redesigned so not only are we going to get a new home screen manager for Android for smartphones and these buttons along the bottom but a lot of the little visual cues of Android are going to change and you're gonna see that as I continue to walk through so here we are in the calculator let's dive back home nothing really to to see there except for some really large buttons and go back in the app tray and let's try to get into the browser have a feeling the browser is going to force close because it's already done that several times it's very likely that we're going to see an Android smartphone browser redesigned for honeycomb it's not going to be as dramatic as what you're about to see because smartphones have smaller screens but it's likely that we'll see a better tabbed interface in Android Honeycomb for smartphones we'll also see our buttons the back and the forward the stop button come out of the menu button that you have to press in order to access those functions and also over here there will be a search button and a favorites button kind of bringing out these functions again making it easier and less button intensive when you're browsing so again here just forced closed so it stayed open just long enough so you can get a little view of how things look let's jump into the clock application and I think from there you're gonna see really these new these new cues that androids calling the holographic interface a lot of sort of flat textures blue colors here we have the clock we've got the redesigned honeycomb you know Fonz there it's not much you can do here someone get out of here let's go back to the home screen and tap on the multitasking button by now we should be able to do some things with it let's see this doesn't always function but there we go this is what multitasking looks like in Android and this is probably going to come through in the honeycomb smartphones that are going to come out so one click tap of a button here that is always on the screen will allow you to dive into the recently used applications much more efficient than what we get right now and Android on smartphones which is that annoying tap and hold of the home button ok so let's dive into settings and a lot of these applications here like email and settings have a split pane view we're probably not going to see the split pane view in Android Honeycomb for smartphones because it doesn't really make sense you're dealing with a smaller screen but here you can get a sense for some of these new visual cues i'ts was talking about so we've got sort of blue highlighting here that's new if we go to some of these options you'll see the check boxes are redesigned the backgrounds are redesigned that the fought seems to be different and we're gonna see all of this come through on the smartphone also this new feature where when you do something that the phone doesn't like you get a red ring around the screen and here we are in in sort of about phone showing the Android versions honeycomb and we're not really using a battery so it doesn't really matter there let's go into applications and you can see the new check boxes you get a little green square inside of a inside of a square right now in Android for smartphones you get a green check box in Gingerbread you get the point so that settings kind of redesigned let's go back to the home screen and see if there's anything else we missed let's say we want to search Google using this widget well we tap in there and we write you know let's see if it'll actually follow what I'm typing there sort of kind of not really we can actually we should be able to open the keyboard by tapping down here on the keyboard icon I think it's detecting that it's using an external keyboard here so it is not showing the keyboard by default but let's see if we can get the Android keyboard to open that'd be great this is the wrong keyboard okay well we want the English keyboard which is good it should be showing English keyboard right so if we go back and tap this again let's see what happens I think oh we're gonna get the same menu so not exactly sure how the keyboard works here in honeycomb so let's do Dell Venue in for a minute and press ENTER it's going to put us right into Google and do a google search the browser is going to open again but it's probably gonna force closed but you may see what results look like on the screen the honeycomb browser I think improves upon the already good rendering fidelity of the the Android browser that you see in smartphone so here we are we've got this little menu in the upper right corner let's see if we're lucky enough to see what it says before it force closes which it's been doing a lot today doesn't look like we're gonna get there yeah force close okay so that's that's pretty much it let's see if we can get into a couple more things before we end this video I know it's getting along here there's a lot to show but we're just trying to show the the the important aspects the things that we think are going to show up in the smartphone so pressing the plus button should probably go into the home screen manager so it's an alternative way to get into the home screen manager instead of tapping and holding on the background you can just dive right into the that same screen with the button in the upper right corner so there it is Android Honeycomb in a nutshell a lot of this stuff we're gonna see on smartphones in 2011 we're gonna see the new and improved home screen manager we're gonna see the new notification system at the bottom of the screen here which makes a lot more sense we're gonna have a faster way to multitask a lot of new visual cues new checkboxes and new system fonts things like that Android Honeycomb for smartphones is going to be awesome and it's really going to change not only the way we use Android but how OMS can design hardware for us we're gonna see some cool stuff in 2011 so if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and for more on honeycomb and smartphone news and reviews check out pocketnow.com thanks for watching