Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minimun from a pocket now calm and in this video we're going to talk about the honeycomb interface paradigm that is how everything is arranged on the screen sort of the philosophy behind the interface what you see in what you interact with on the xoom tablet in honeycomb let's get to it so we don't cover tablets on pocket now calm we do smartphones we like to stick to that but I am a tablet enthusiast and I have a lot of thoughts about the motorola xoom so i thought i'd put this video up there for those of you that watch our videos on youtube because maybe you're thinking about getting the zoom or you're thinking about get is getting the other android tablets coming out this year because there's going to be a lot of them just want to talk about a few things here there are a lot of good things and a lot of not so good things about honeycomb so let's start with the good things first good thing to talk about is this home screen it's the dashboard you wish you had on your iPad from here you can quickly glance through your emails you can see your next calendar appointment you can scroll through your your favorites you can look through android applications that google recommends you can look through youtube videos you can add widgets to your heart's content and get this active live information on your home screen which is really fantastic so you don't have to sit there like you do on the ipad and go into your email then go into YouTube and then go into your favorites or Safari it's just a dashboard a launching point from which you can do really anything and catch up on information that matters to you it makes a lot of sense but then there's stuff about honeycomb that just doesn't make any sense let me show you so we're going to bounce into the email application here learning an email so I've got a picture here somewhere it's going to load the picture there it is great HTC pyramid perhaps now right now we are in the preview viewing area right so we've got the envy the messages on the right on the left and the preview on the right I need to learn left from right still apparently so let's say we delete a message and when you delete a message or when you check off a message you get this thing that comes across right that pops something that wasn't there before you can either click done and the check mark goes away or you can action on it over here so let's say we want to delete it okay so i deleted one thing and it stayed in this view but watch what happens when i delete two things it goes into another view when i delete two things that makes absolutely no sense it's very very confusing and it's just kind of silly so let's go back into a message and talk more about how the honeycomb interface is laid out and sort of the the philosophy behind it so in honeycomb in the native applications system menu options or program menu options occur in the upper right corner it's kind of an inconvenient spot because you're constantly having to reach all the way there to the upper right corner to change certain menu options whereas an Android for smartphones the menu options come up from the bottom right when you press you know that menu button that is present on every single android phone so it's a little bit annoying to have to reach up to the upper right corner and then in a lot of applications you'll get a variety of icons up here which you don't really know what they are until you tap them they're not labeled some of them are a little bit unclear and then you get this little menu option which is common to a lot of honeycomb apps this is sort of like the menu or the file that you would get on a Windows computer or a Mac okay so let's go into another application and talk about the interface now you get a totally different experience if you go into an app that's not made for honeycomb and because there are only 37 apps made for honeycomb plus the built-in ones most of the time you're going to be experiencing a different kind of interface so honey comes kind of inconsistent so now this application york times is made for smartphones not for tablets so we have this extra fourth button down here which is the the menu that you would typically see on your smartphone so now the menu occurs on the bottom of the screen where is an email app which you were just in the menu options occur in the upper right corner of the screen it's very inconsistent and it very much makes us think that honeycomb was an afterthought android applications from the beginning weren't built so that they worked on a tablet you could argue the same about iOS but at least iOS you don't have this problem where there's the extra menu button that needs to be there for legacy apps and again this wouldn't be such a such a such a big problem if there were more honeycomb X there are only 37 honeycomb apps or perhaps there are more but there are no way of sort of just seeing the tablet apps except through the feature tablets app section when you see featured that means that they are taking from the best but there's no other way to see all of the tablet apps I don't think there are any so if we scroll down there's no tablet section if we scroll down there are there's no tablet section the only tablet section here is right here featured tablet apps and that has 37 items listed and some of these even though they're listed in the tablet app section are not optimized for honeycomb I'll give you an example we scroll down we'll see Kendall which I've already downloaded here so I'll go back to the home screen open up Kendall this is obviously not optimized for a tablet I mean no one's email address is this long another password is certainly not this long furthermore you know this is a smartphone app because i put the keyboard down you get this fourth button here that's a clear indication that this is not a honeycomb app so then why is google putting it in the featured app section i was hitting this button because i was trying to hit that button and so here's the multi-tasking menu it's pretty cool it gives you little previews it only lets you switch between five apps at a time which is strange because in Gingerbread and Froyo you can switch between 8 apps and in iOS you can switch between well depending on whether you're orienting your device and landscape or portrait probably about 10 apps or so but here in a honeycomb you only get five and you always know your most recent app because it goes to the bottom of the screen here so a lot of inconsistencies about where the menus are and things like that now how about some some good things about honeycomb beyond just the the home screen interface here sort of the dashboard well over here in the bottom right corner this collects all of your notifications in one place it's like the Notification Center and it makes a lot of sense it's very similar to the Android notification shade on smartphones it's a lot better than you get an eye we're notifications just pop up in your face all the time and really annoy you here you get notifications and there's kind of a an earthquake notification because there's a there's an app downloaded here called earthquake you can see all the fingerprints on the screen so that sends notifications and when you're working on something whether you're browsing the web or doing anything else the notifications are very unobtrusive they just sort of simmer in the bottom right corner you can action on them immediately or they will fade away or you can press the X to force them to go away for good so the notification system is really awesome let's talk about the web browser the web browser I found to be incredibly unstable about one out of every five times I use the browser it crashes and even when I'm not doing anything that intense the cool thing about the browsers that you get the chrome like interface here with the tabs and the buttons but when you start opening lots of different tabs will just keep opening tabs it gets really unwieldy to manage the tabs you can't close them all in one shot you have to click on them individually oops and close them and close them and close them and it's just it's not that into it if they should have the X button builds right into every tab so that you can manage tabs more easily and there don't have any options you can play with here so we can go over here to the favorites and it shows cool little previews and you can change the view to list view and again I'm using this little menu in the upper right corner you can see some sort of foam that's what that is over here and let's go back and we can also go to search we can use voice search and say turn on speech recognition pizza and of course the voice recognition in honeycomb in andhra and general is very very good so you can use your voice to search safari can't do that on the ipad of course we can do a lot of other things we can add as favorites with the OneTouch we can go into the settings and very basic settings so we can change the homepage this is really cool sync with google chrome so you can actually sink your passwords and your bookmarks with your honeycomb tablet now that chrome has that feature it's really great privacy and security you can clear cache and do all the things that you typically can do search engine you can change that there's a really cool setting in labs actually want to cover so it's called quick control watch what happens it shrinks the the address bar and gives you a lot more screen real estate it's better demonstrated when there's nothing on the screen now to access the functions of the browser you slide your thumb over this is cool this is innovation right here so you get a big full screen view you can do that from any side you got to kind of learn what these what these icons mean but they're pretty obvious so back forward refresh this one will show the URL bar put the keyboard down see what else we got favorites new tab and the menu options here from the upper right corner so the browser is pretty good as long as it doesn't crash on you it would also be nice to be able to have a better tab management there halfway there with the way the tabs are shown sort of like a browser on a desktop but they're not all the way there because you don't get the X button and it just there's no way to rearrange tabs they're missing a lot of features or at least what is what I'm trying to say let's go back to the home screen and one more UI element just want to point out here nothing surprising here this is the application tray this quite simply is a listing of your apps and you can go over to my apps if you want to get the apps that you've downloaded onto your Android tablet so overall Android Honeycomb has a lot of promise but the interface paradigm is a little bit confusing sometimes you'll get buttons in the upper right corner if you download a non-native honeycomb at the menu options will occur on the bottom of the screen instead of the top of the screen email does some weird things the browser does some weird things and it crashes I think honeycomb version you know 3.1 or whatever is coming up next will address a lot of these things but right now honeycomb really truly feels like an afterthought and even with this awesome sort of dashboard of information the ipad looks much better because it's so much more mature than the zoom at this moment in time so that's really it for this video just wanted to talk a little bit about some thoughts with the motorola xoom and with android honeycomb have any comments please leave some below and give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it thanks for watching and that's it for now