Google’s Honeycomb Event Coverage ~ GoAndroid

Google’s Honeycomb Event just wrapped up, and while we weren’t able to be there for the live show — yes, we got an invite, but our staff, sadly, was unable to attend — we caught the live streaming event and are happy to sum-up the basics for you.

Andy Rubin kicked off the event, introducing Honeycomb officially, and saying a few brief words, including Google’s excitement at Android’s growth. The number of Android devices at CES shocked even them, and they are thrilled about what the future holds. Rubin then introduced Hugo Barra, who showed off some of Honeycomb’s new features.

Hugo’s opening statement was that their “approach for android has been to equip developers with the best possible toolkit that we can build, and then get out of their way.” The Honeycomb dev team is encouraging innovation, ideally way outside anything they’ve ever thought of, from the developer community. Then he showed off the main new features of Android 3.0. First he pointed to the bottom-left of the screen with the back button, the home button, and a “multitask” button that will give you quick access to the last several applications you have run. Also in the bottom-right the refined notification area. Rather than being at the top of the screen, notifications have been moved to the lower-right bar, where not only have the notifications been streamlined to be even less intrusive, but more information is given. When receiving IMs, your contacts picture is displayed along with the first snippet of the message. When the music player is active in the background, the music player notification can pause and play. This is also where the quick settings panel is located, giving you easy access to airplane mode, wifi, etc. He also showed off the new “stacked” widgets, which let you scroll through the information you want by swiping panels down to access the ones behind them, be they bookmarks, pictures, popular Youtube videos, or news articles.

Hugo also talked about “application fragments,” which are basically panes built into applications that interwork to put the focus on the most important information, but also allowing easier navigation. The example he used to highlight this was the Gmail app. On the left pane was a list of labels, with the inbox being on the central-most, focused pane. When a message is selected, it becomes the focus, with the left page being the inbox. When viewing the inbox, messages can be dragged from the central pane to the left pane for quick access to assigning labels. Also when viewing the inbox, at the top there is an application bar that gives various choices for actions taken based on what’s selected. A search bar when viewing the whole inbox, which might change to global actions as messages are selected — archive, star, etc.

About this time in the presentation, Hugo also talked about how existing applications will run perfectly in Honeycomb on the tablet, as that has been one of the biggest focuses of the Honeycomb development team. He showed off Fruit Ninja to demonstrate this — the exact version available in the market today, built before development on Honeycomb had even started.

Honeycomb is highly optimized to maximize performance, and hardware acceleration can be enabled with one line of code. Honeycomb is also bringing new animation frameworks, to add new transition effects in various apps, and also the homescreen. I immediately noticed the transition effects, as the one shown reminds me of the one just added to LauncherPro that gives the appearance of having the various homescreens on the inside of a cube. Honeycomb also features a new graphics engine, called Renderscript. It is the foundation for the interface, including the new Youtube and Books apps that display information in a carousel-type effect. Renderscript also supports multi-core processing at kernel level. At this point, he showed off several 3D applications: Maps, music (also sporting a carousel interface, like the Youtube app), and Google Body, which is much like the Google Maps of human anatomy – it even features layers, like muscles, skeletal, and the circulatory system.

At this point, Thomas Williamson, CEO of game development company War Drum Studios, to show off the 3D graphics on Honeycomb. He showed off the games Monster Madness — an adaptation of the PS3 hack-and-slash shooter — and Great Battles, Medieval, which is a History Channel strategy game with massive battles, and is the first game that will use both cores in dual-core devices.

Back to Hugo: The new camera app features a full UI built to allow access to everything you’d want right at your fingers, including take video and upload directly to Youtube. He also showed off the video chat app, and said there’s been a huge focus on image stabilization.

Then he brought to the stage Louis Gump, the Vice-President of Mobile at CNN. It was his task to show off the video capabilities of the Android tablet. He showed off CNN’s tablet app.

Up to 350 stories in one sheet
Includes live video streaming
Current stories
iReports – featuring the ability to upload your own iReport (as demo’d by Lila)

The OS platform is just half the story, the other half being how to get that platform to the audience, and Chris Yerga is brought forward to cover that side of the story.

Chris talks about changes to the Android Market, which were made to aid users and developers. Chief among these is the Android Market webstore, which will allow users to browse the market from their PC, and purchase and install directly from web. On the homepage is a carousel showcasing featured apps. Click on an app and get the app’s page, featuring a description, screenshots, user reviews. From here, much as with Appbrain, you can buy the app directly, at which point the webstore will ask which device to install to via a selection drop-down, and can be filtered by compatible devices. There is also a link to share via Twitter. Links tweeted work from the phone as well, pulling up the market page on the device. The webstore also allows search, filter by paid/freeapps, by device compatibility of all devices you have registered with your Google account, and by app popularity. It also features a “My market account” section, which has a list of all applications purchased before. It also allows you to give your devices nicknames, for easy reference. The market webstore is live now and can be found at market.android.com.

Also changing is how users can purchase content: Apps can be listed at various prices for various currencies, with the ability for developers to specify the price in each supported currency. This is being rolled out on a staggered basis, and it’s possible for developers to ignore this and let things continue as they currently function. In response to developers’ request for additional ways to monetize their apps, Googe has built an in-app purchase SDK. Bart Decrem with Disney Mobile is one of the devs who has been working with the Android team on this, and he was brought forward to show off the tech. He talked about three Disney Mobile apps they’ve developed for Android: Radio Disney, JellyCar, and Tap Tap Revenge. The latter is a Guitar Hero-type game that sells songs in-app, and will be available for all devices running Android 2.1 or later. Bart also mentioned that they had the in-app purchase SDK for about five days before they had it fully functional within Tap Tap Revolution, citing its thoroughness as being the main reason they were able to get it completed so quickly. The dev code for the in-app purchasing SDK releases today.

At this point, they wrapped up with Hugo finally doing a little more chat with “LadyKiller,” who was none othe than Grammy-winning artist Cee Lo. Hugo’s closing statement was that at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, there will be over 50 devs showing off the Honeycomb apps that they’ve been working on. Then they let everyone present go play with the 15 Xoom tablets that they had in the back room, but obviously that wasn’t shown in the video. Made me wish, yet again, that I had been present.

So, that’s basically what’s new with the Honeycomb OS, built from the ground up for tablets. Highlights will be posted soon at the Android Youtube page. We’ll be seeing more and more of it in the next few weeks, so stay tuned and we’ll keep you posted.