Sweet! Google’s Honeycomb to be released by end of Q1

Google’s Android 3.0, aka Honeycomb, the first version of the Android OS optimised for tablet devices, is finally ready to come out of the labs and onto the shelves. This was announced at CES 2011 in Las Vegas when Motorola unveiled the Motorola Xoom,  the first tablet device to run Honeycomb, which the company said would be hitting retail stores by the end of this quarter.

Little else of Android’s latest iteration was seen beyond demo videos and preview (see video below), but early impressions are that Honeycomb is distinctly different than mobile Android, maximising the larger screen to display its widgets more prominently.
Besides that, Honeycomb features a new wall-of-video look for browsing YouTube, a tablet-optimised Gmail app, full-screen Gmail video chat, a new 3D Google Maps interface, and e-book application to access Google’s e-books.

The hardware behind the first Honeycomb tablet is impressive too: when shipped, the 10.1-inch screen Xoom is expected to have a dual-core processor that is capable of reaching 2GHz performance, an HD-wide screen, front and back-facing cameras, including a full HD camcorder, and an accelerometer and a gyroscope.

While Motorola’s Xoom may be the first device in the market to run Honeycomb, it won’t be the only device, as Toshiba also presented CES goers a glimpse of its 10.1-inch tablet, which it says will also run Honeycomb. In the same week, LG mobile phones also announced that it is set to release its Honeycomb-powered G-Slate “in the coming months.”

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