Guest post by In a story about an upcoming tablet from MSI launching in March, the Taiwanese website Digitimes might just have spilled the beans about the approximate launch date of Android 3. The tablet mentioned will ship in March-April next year with Android 3. Android 3 will be optimised for tablets and some big name companies, including Motorola and Lenovo, were holding back on these tablets until the version 3 release. On Techradar, Google’s Andy Rubin already showed off an Android 3 prototype tablet from Motorola that gave some clues as to what Android 3 might be capable of. This includes easier navigation requiring absolutely no physical buttons, as well as 3D processing power. Android 3 is also said to have a redesigned UI, support for higher resolution 1280×760 displays and has a strict minimum hardware requirement of a 1Ghz CPU, 512 RAM and a minimum display size of 3.5″.
Actually, support for extra large screens is already available in the 2.3 SDK.
Also I think the minimum hardware requirements rumor has been debunked already. The article linked to in that last sentence seems to be about six months old (still calls Android 3.0 “Gingerbread”) and doesn’t seem very reliable.
So Google are finally acknowledging that tablets exist, after finally acknowledging that touch screens exist, after finally acknowledging that large-screen phones exist.
Android was created for 320×240 phones not too unlike Windows Mobile 2003 hardware at the time and there it’s mindset has firmly stuck until forced to accept that things have moved on without it.
Max 1280? If the iPad 2 gets a high-DPI screen, then it will be easily more than 1280.
There’s Android, once again doomed to follow and not to lead.
Yeah except like I said, the information you criticize Android on is incorrect.
Google has already acknowledged that tablets exist, seeing how the current SDK supports them. The max 1280 pixels is also incorrect, because the Android SDK has never defined a set amount of pixels. It has always worked with terms like “small” and “large” to define screen sizes. I’m sure the latest “extra large” screen size in Android 2.3 will work fine with any high resolution.
Oh and Android 1.0 was designed for 320×480, not 320×240, just like the iPhone SDK. In fact, the current iPhone SDK is still based on a 320×480 layout, for the iPhone 4’s screen all coordinates are just scaled by 2.
Sounds like a terrible hack
Aye.
iOS isn’t resolution independent unlike Android. The tradeoff is that iOS can get away with using fast pixmaps for chrome and Android has to draw it. iOS just scales unsupported apps (which looks like turd) where as for Android one has to make a different layout for different dpi values (currently one can choose ldpi,mdpi,hdpi).
Edited 2010-12-29 00:51 UTC