Google are saying that one of the reasons they are planning to cling on to the Honeycomb source code for the time being is because they rushed the build of the latest Android OS out to meet deadlines for the Motorola Xoom launch.
Andy Rubin, vice president of engineering at Google states that to meet the schedule for the Xoom some compromises had to be made in the development of Honeycomb. One such compromise was the total lack of mobile phonedevelopment time. Google are sure unsure about how Honeycomb will act on a phone device they have said “We have no idea if it will even work on phones” and if anyone was to install 3.0 on a phone they might get “a really bad user experience”!
These are not very confident sounding views! Couple this with the fact that many Honeycomb reviewers have complained of buggy performance and choppy video playback despite highly advanced and powerful hardware specifications.
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Google are now getting on the case though and have started to build a new OS called ‘Ice-cream’ which will merge the the latest version of the phone Android 2.3 with the advanced features of 3.0.
Android Ice-cream is expected to be shown of at the Google developers conference in May.
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