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Sunday, February 6, 2011

Google launches Android Market for the Web, shows off Honeycomb

BUYING GUIDE.

The just-launched Android Web store lets you find, purchase, and remotely install new Android apps onto your device, all straight from a browser. Also: Google demonstrates some of the new bells and whistles in Honeycomb, the upcoming tablet-centric version of Android.

You can check out the new, Web-based Android Market right here, although some users (including me) were having trouble logging in to the site Wednesday afternoon. (Word had it that the glitch would be fixed later in the day.) Update (3:15 p.m. ET): Looks like it's working now.

The online market looks a bit like a pared-down version of Apple's App Store on iTunes, complete with jumbo-sized promos and an abundance of users reviews.

A series of categories sits in the left-hand column of the page, while tabs to the right let you check out featured apps, as well as the most popular paid and free applications.

An info page for a given app contains the usual screenshots and user ratings, while users will also be able to recommend the app to friends, watch an embedded demo video (a feature sorely lacking in the Apple App Store), or tweet their latest app discoveries.

Click the "buy" button, and an info screen pops up with permissions and access warnings (telling you, for example, whether the app will be tapping into any personal or location data), and giving you a choice of stored credit cards.

Once that's all done, just hit '"install," and (here's the really clever part) the app will begin installing itself on your Android device, no syncing required. (A "My Devices" page in the Android Web store will let you name and manage your various Android apps, by the way.)

Google also announced that it's finally enabling support for in-app purchases, good for unlocking new "premium" features, buying extra ammo or weapons in a shooter game, and so on.

Google also took some time during Wednesday's briefing to demo Honeycomb, the upcoming, tablet-focused version of Android that'll be powering new dual-core tablets from Motorola and LG. Among the improvements: revamped home-screen navigation, including a snazzy multitasking view that lets you see thumbnails of running apps in their respective frozen states.

During CES, we already saw the trio of on-screen buttons in the lower-left corner of the display: one for home, one for back, and another for … something else. Well, that something else turns out to be multitasking, and Honeycomb take a clever approach to letting you switch between apps.

Rather than just swiping back and forth between a series of static icons, tapping the multitasking button calls up a column of medium-sized thumbnails showing your running apps frozen in the background; tap one, and it'll jump back to life. Nice.

Also new is a rejiggered notification bar, which sits in the bottom-right corner of the display. The new, expanded notifications will show both contact names and images for incoming texts and IMs, play and pause controls for music, and other features depending on the whim of a given developer. Tapping on the notifications bar will call up a pane showing all your notifications at once, which you can dismiss individually by clicking the "X" next to the item.

Not bad, but the most compelling new features for Honeycomb lie under the hood, with developers getting a custom toolkit allowing them to easily revamp their apps for use on both a smaller smartphone screen and a jumbo tablet display.

That's not to say existing Android apps won't already work on Honeycomb-powered tablets, with a Google exec showing off how Fruit Ninja, a causal game built before Honeycomb even existed, works "amazing" well on a tablet—and indeed, a live demo showed the exec slicing away at various animated fruits and vegetables on the Honeycomb-running Motorola Xoom, complete with a series of multi-finger swipes.

But developers will now be able to funnel the content and features of their apps into so-called application "fragments," which can be exposed, hidden, and rearranged depending on the device and screen size. A demo of Gmail, for example, showed the app running in a two-pane view, with the left-hand pane sliding off the screen to make room for the body of a message. Those various columns in Gmail are essentially chopped up into different app "fragments" that behave differently for smaller smartphone screens or bigger tablet displays (which can also be oriented vertically or horizontally).

The Gmail demo also showed off a few other impressive Honeycomb-native features, such as a "drag manager" that allows users to drag a message from the list pane into the neighboring folder pane.

Along the top of the display, a dynamic application bar includes controls that change depending on a given situation—for example, enabling bulk actions if you've got multiple e-mail messages selected versus individual actions for a single selected message.

Google execs also showed off Honeycomb's native video chat features, even pulling in Grammy nominee Cee Lo Green (who chose "Lady Killer" as his handle) for an impromptu call.

Games in Honeycomb will be able to take advantage of 2D hardware acceleration with the addition of a single line of code, Google execs said, while a new 3D rendering engine, dubbed "RenderScript," will allow for polished 3D graphics. The developers of the PlayStation 3 title Monster Madness showed off a reasonably slick-looking, RenderScript-powered port of the game for Honeycomb, while the hundreds of marching troops in strategy title "Great Battles Medieval" was said to push the Xoom's dual-core processor "to the limit."

CNN was also on hand to demonstrate a Honeycomb version of its tablet news app, complete with streaming video and the ability to upload video snippets to the network's iReport site.

— Ben Patterson is a technology blogger for Yahoo! News.

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For more on retail outlets, check out our where to buy Bestsellers in Phones article.

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