12 Best Android 3.0 Honeycomb Features [With Screenshots]

Everyone seems to be excited about the latest version of Android 3.0, honeycomb which is designed from the ground up for devices with larger screen sizes, particularly for tablets like Motorola Xoom. Developer has also spent lot of time refining the user experience in Honeycomb to develop this brand new, truly virtual and holographic user interface theme. What is more interesting about Android 3.0 Honeycomb is the features and technology introduced for users and developers. If you are still unaware about Android 3.0 Honeycomb then have a look at the video below:

Android developers has released many exciting features for users and developers. You can check out these 12 best Android 3.0 Honeycomb features, which are expected to fix many of the issues concerning Android.

1. Optimized Tablet UI - You will find this very interesting as the general layout of UI has extravagant space on the home screen for icons and widgets. With this well optimized Table UI you are free to accommodate many required things just on home screen.

2. Redesigned widgets – With the updated set of Android 3.0 UI widgets, it becomes easier for developers to add new content to their existing applications. The new UI widgets concentrate on bigger screens such as tablets and including the new holographic UI theme. Don’t miss out on the new widgets comprising a 3D stack, search box, a date/time picker, number picker, calendar, popup menu, and others.

3. Elegant Notification Bar – You will find the notification bar at the bottom of the screen so as to offer quick access to notifications. Back, Home, and Recent Apps are the three buttons you will find on the System Bar. In the present System Bar there is a new “lights out Mode” which can be dimmed for full-screen viewing, for example videos.

4. Customizable Home Screen – Home screen is more or less the similar to previous version on Android where you can add widgets, apps and shortcuts. However, when you are allowed to swipe between five different screens along with an awesome new 3D look for the home screen is definitely fun and this is what the new version offers!

5. Action-bar – Action bar is placed at the top of the screen where users can access contextual options, navigation, widgets, or content.  This one is always present when any application is in use, however its content, theme, and other properties are handled by the application and not by the system.

6. Redesigned Keyboard and Improved Copy/Paste – To make typing fast and accurate, Android 3.0 has a soft keyboard on larger screen size. These reshaped, repositioned and new keys (Tab key) are certainly welcomed by users that offer richer and more effective text input. Copy/paste now becomes simpler for users by just selecting a word by press-hold and then moving the selection area as needed by dragging a set of bounding arrows to new positions.

7. Browser Enhancements – Browser enhancements include tabbed web pages, form auto-fill, bookmark syncing with Google Chrome, and private browsing. Other updated areas would include Browser, Contacts, Email and Camera that can be used more efficiently with your larger screen tablet.

8. Visual multi-tasking – Users have had the benefit of multitasking in Android for now and latest version is even better. When you launch apps to handle multitask, you can make use of Recent Apps list in the System Bar to see and switch between one application to another. The System Bar also has the snapshot list that state when you viewed it last.

9. Multiselect, Clipboard, and Drag-and-drop – This will be really convenient for developers when handling various items in lists or grids, where developer can offer a new multiselect mode to choose multiple item for one action. The new clipboard will let developers copy any type of data into and out of their applications. Further, neat drag-and-drop will help to easily manage and organize files.

10. New Connectivity options – New APIs for Bluetooth A2DP and HSP let applications offer audio streaming and headset control. Support for Bluetooth insecure socket connection lets applications connect to simple devices that may not have a user interface.

11. Support for Multi-core Processors – Android 3.0 is the first version of the platform designed to run on either single or multi-core processor architectures. Many other changes in the Dalvik VM, Bionic library, and elsewhere add support for symmetric multiprocessing in multicore environments. This will do nothing but help all the applications including those that are single-threaded.

12. Hardware acceleration for 2D graphics – Android honeycomb offers a new hardware-accelerated OpenGL renderer, which offers a performance boost to many common graphics operations for applications running in the Android framework. When the renderer is enabled, most operations in Canvas, Paint, Xfermode, ColorFilter, Shader, and Camera are accelerated.

Android 3.0 honeycomb of course has many other interesting features like support for video chat using Google Talk and it also gives access to over 100,000 apps, however above given were really interesting. In case, you got some more to share on Android 3.0, then we would like hear that!

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Tagged as: android, Honeycomb