Waiting for Honeycomb - Seattle Post Intelligencer (blog)

CES has always been a great source of vaporware - promised products that never materialize. Last year's show, though, with its horde of e-readers and tablets, was a vaporware watershed. Most of those items touted with much fanfare a year ago never materialized.

At first blush, CES 2011 looks like a rerun: Lots of tablets, but almost none of them available right now. Sorry, you'll have to wait. And wait. And maybe, you'll wait some more.

But there's a difference, and an important one.

Most of the tablets announced here will use Google's Android operating system. And many will be running a new version of Android, 3.0, which has been code-named Honeycomb. Unlike previous Android releases, Honeycomb is designed specifically to be used with tablets, both in terms of its capabilities and its user interface.

Until this week, Honeycomb had been something of a mystery. Google had kept the new interface under tight wraps - the only time it had really been glimpsed was when Android chief Andy Rubin pulled out a prototype version of a Motorola tablet during the D8 tech conference last year.

But on Wednesday, some of those wraps came off. Google released a short video highlighting Honeycomb's new look-and-feel.

Also, Motorola gave a name to the tablet Rubin flashed - the Xoom. And unlike other vendors who are showing future tablets but not turning them on, or running them with an older version of Android, Motorola was not so shy. It started showed Honeycomb in a limited fashion, boasting that the Xoom would be the first tablet released with Honeycomb. The device is scheduled to launch sometime in the current quarter.

Earlier this week, I got a chance to see and hold the Xoom at the Digital Experience event at Caesar's Palace. I didn't get to actually use the tablet - it was being demoed by a Motorola rep. What I saw was cool, and I could see why it all these Android tablets can't launch yet - Honeycomb is still very much a work in progress.

The tablet was mostly running a series of screen animations showing different features. But the Motorola rep had to frequently reboot the machine. It crashed often.

Of course, there's no telling exactly why that was going on. Motorola may have put a particularly unstable build of Honeycomb on it, or the prototype may have had hardware issues. But it was illustrative of the difficulty in developing complex new technology like this. Keep in mind that, under a veneer of easy use and simplicity is often a complex jumble of code and dependencies. Getting every component - hardware and software - to work with each other is seldom easy.

I get the impression from talking to many of these vendors that they'd be ready to launch now if Honeycomb was in their hands. Once it is released to them in finished form, it will be a while before they can make sure it works with the hardware they've developed. That will add to the delays.

To a certain extent, these companies who have opted to benefit from Android and Honeycomb in particular - the operating system is free to them - are also at Google's mercy. If Honeycomb is delayed, their products are delayed.

Some have opted to forge ahead with a full line of tablets and develop hardware for Honeycomb later. ViewSonic. for example, has a 10-inch tablet that dual-boots between Android 1.6 and Windows 7; a 10-inch tablet that runs Android 2.2-only; a 7-inch Android 2.2 tablet; and a 4-inch Android-based phone that's in the prototype stage.

Jeff Volpe, ViewSonic's vice president of Global Brand and Emerging Technologies, says the company's 2011 roadmap adds Honeycomb based tablets to the mix later this year. But the company isn't waiting for Google to finish the software - it jumped into the game several months ago.

There's a similar issue with Windows-based tablets, or "slates", as Microsoft prefers to call them. Windows 7 is generally regarded as a lousy operating system for touch-based tablets, and while there are some tablets available with Windows 7 on them, all eyes are on the next version of Windows. Microsoft has indicated it will be better able to run on tablets, but it's at least two years off, if not more.

Ditto for HP and the webOS technology it got in the acquisition of Palm. Its tablet computers won't be unveiled until later this year, possible at an already announced Feb. 9 press event.

But again, the real flood of tablets will begin once Google releases Honeycomb. A lot is riding on that release. If you were feeling grandiose, you might say the entire industry is waiting to exhale based on Honeycomb's launch. They're hoping Google gets it done sooner rather than later, and gets it right.

- Posted by Dwight Silverman