Android version 3.x "Honeycomb"

3.x "Honeycomb"

 Honeycomb was, to say the least, an oddity — a divergence in Google's hard-charging path toward smartphone dominance. In fact, Honeycomb wasn't for smartphones at all. Instead, Google returned to Motorola — the company that it had worked with to deliver Android 2.0 exclusively on the Droid — to produce a device in the same vein as the Nexus series that would showcase "stock" Android 3.0, a variant of Android targeted exclusively at tablets. That device would become the Xoom.

Though Honeycomb hasn't seen the levels of market traction that Google was probably aiming for, it previewed a fundamental redesign of Android's user interface that would be more thoroughly built out in Android 4.0:

A move from green to blue accents. Green was, is, and likely forever will be associated with Android. The Android logo is bright green, of course, and Google's official Android site is covered in green accents. On the actual platform, though, green was shown the door with the release of Honeycomb. In its place, a light, desaturated blue was used for the battery and signal indicators, the clock widget, and a variety of highlights and trim pieces throughout the interface.

Redesigned home screen and widget placement. Rather than choosing home screen widgets from a list, sight unseen, Honeycomb ratcheted up the user friendliness a couple notches by showing visible previews for each type of widget available on the system — and once you choose your widget, you can place it on any of Honeycomb's five home screen panels from a single, zoomed-out view showing all five at once. Though Android had always used a grid for widget and icon placement on the home screen, Honeycomb did a better job of embracing it and exposing it to the user — below each widget preview, you can see exactly how many "grid squares" it'll consume once placed.

The death of physical buttons. On a Honeycomb tablet, there's no need for dedicated, physical buttons for Back, Home, Menu, and Search as there had been on phones running 2.3 and below — instead, Back and Home have become virtual buttons that occupy a new "system bar" at the bottom of the screen. Because they're virtual, the operating system has the flexibility to show, hide, or change them when it makes sense to do so — and for hardware manufacturers, less bezel space needs to be devoted to supporting hardware buttons.

Improved multitasking. Borrowing a page out of webOS's playbook (keep in mind that webOS design guru Matias Duarte was employed by Google by the time Honeycomb was released), a new Recent Apps virtual button at the bottom of the screen produces a list of apps recently used — and more importantly, screen captures for each. On Gingerbread and prior, seeing recently-used apps involved a long-press of the Home key — something users would rarely think to do — and you were presented only with each app's icon, not a helpful thumbnail.

A new paradigm for app layout. Honeycomb introduced the concept of the "action bar," a permanently-placed bar at the top of each app that developers can use to show frequently-accessed options, context menus, and so on — it's something of a dedicated status bar for each individual application. Additionally, Honeycomb introduced support for multi-column app layouts, a nod toward the version's tight focus on tablets.

Android 3.1 and 3.2 were primarily maintenance releases (hence their continued use of the Honeycomb name), but they did produce a couple important features that have been retroactively deployed to most Android 3.0 tablets on the market. 3.1 added support for resizeable home screen widgets using anchors that appear when pressing and holding; a variety of third-party skins had supported widget resizing previously, but Android 3.1 pulled the functionality into the core platform.