Google in Android 'Honeycomb' fondleslab demo fest

Google has given the world an extensive demonstration of Android 3.0, codenamed Honeycomb, a new incarnation of the mobile OS designed specifically for tablets. At a press event at Google's Mountain View headquarters, Google man Hugo Barra showed off Honeycomb's so-called "holographic" UI as well as several new Google …

[Anonymous Coward]

INSTALL_ASSET?

CIA et al. gotta love this...

[dotdavid]

Web-based Market

You have to wonder why it has taken up til now for Google to enable a web-based Android market. I thought the firm was supposed to be all about the web, and a quick shufti at it just now doesn't show anything that AppBrain wasn't doing a couple of years ago...

[NoneSuch]

Let us hope...

...that INSTALL_ASSET is secure or there will be much egg on face.

[Charlie Clark]

Ticks all the boxes

Sounds like some incredible attention to detail in the UX followed by technical implementation and hopefully extensive testing. You've got to hand it to the Android team that they have gone from being an imitator to a leader in about 18 months.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Holographic"

I assume "holographic" is the usual meaningless marketing bullshit by people who should be murdered, and no holograms are involved?

[Stuart Halliday]

What no vids?

Its all very nice telling us. But where is the videos of the democratic so the rest of us can seen it?

[JDX]

Actually...

The OS sounds quite interesting. Might be awful but sure sounds like they're specifically gone for tablet-specific features not just hacking a desktop or phone OS to fit a bigger screen or no keyboard.

Is Apple doing the same? If not, they could have a scrap on their hands.

[Martin 72]

Honeycomb looks pretty, the Marketplace still sucks

Dear Google,

I can't believe you are the company behind this godforsaken marketplace application.

Why, after all this time, is it not possible for me to sort applications by a way of my choosing? Virtually every other e-commerce interface allows me to sort by: Popularity (number of downloads); rating; name (A-Z); and price.

And another thing: Why does the relevance of the search results suck so much? Why does searching for 'Barcode Scanner' yeild 'Calorie Counter - MyFitnessPal' with 9,505 ratings as the second search result, whereas the app called 'Barcode Scanner' turns up at number 5 with 162,191 ratings?

I thought this might just be a limitation of the phone app, but you carry this awful lack of functionality over to the web? I thought you guys were all about the web?

Don't get me wrong, I'm really happy with Android overall but finding apps for it without resorting to third party app stores/recommendations sucks.