BARCELONA—This year’s Mobile World Congress is the first big coming-out party for tablets running Google’s Android Honeycomb operating system, and Google’s huge booth was crammed full of Honeycomb apps. I was impressed by how some of the apps leveraged tablets’ big screens to offer new experiences that are impossible on phones. That’s the kind of thinking the platform will need to succeed.
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I picked 10 of the top Honeycomb apps for this slideshow. They include a multi-party video conferencing app from Fuze Meeting which spawns way too many windows for a phone; Great Battles Medieval, a strategy game that would look impossibly cramped on a phone; and Pulse News, which uses the big screen to provide a broad view of news feeds from many different Web sites.
Most phone apps will absolutely run on Android Honeycomb, and they’ll run better than iPhone apps do on the iPad. I saw several top Gingerbread apps, including Facebook and Pandora, running on Honeycomb tablets. Generally, the user interfaces get a lot of blank space in them. But the fonts are still sharp, and the UIs work. There wasn’t any of the graininess you see in “blown up” iPhone apps on the iPad.
Honeycomb tablets are coming soon, with the first one, the Motorola Xoom, rumored for arrival later this month on Verizon Wireless. Take a look at my 10 best Honeycomb apps (in no particular order) in this slideshow.