Google has officially released its SDK for Android 3.0 Honeycomb, including a platform preview for developers. In addition, Google has also revealed more technical details about Honeycomb and provided a few screenshots to give everyone another taste of what’s to come.
I’ve put together a new image gallery that includes all 9 of the screenshots that Google released, plus 29 more that I captured by poking around in the Honeycomb emulator in the SDK. This includes a look at the “holographic” UI theme, widgets, apps, settings, and more.
With the release of this SDK (even though the APIs are “non-final”) and Motorola shooting for a late-February to early-March ship date for its Xoom tablet — the first product to run Honeycomb — we are finally nearing opening day for Android’s officially-sanctioned tablet OS.
Judging by the time I spent with the Honeycomb SDK, the OS looks very appealing but still feels very raw. Also, keep in mind that Google is just now getting this in the hands of the wider development community so it’s going to take some time before we have a ton of apps optimized for Android tablets.
Nevertheless, there’s a lot of eye candy and some nice UI work in Honeycomb that is worth a look. It appears that Google’s hiring of Matias Duarte away from HP/Palm to run the Android UX team has yielded some nice dividends.
Image gallery
Android 3.0 Honeycomb: 35+ screenshots
