“Google says it will delay the distribution of its newest Android source code, dubbed Honeycomb, at least for the foreseeable future. The search giant says the software, which is tailored specifically for tablet computers that compete against Apple’s iPad, is not yet ready to be altered by outside programmers and customized for other devices, such as phones,” Ashlee Vance and Brad Stone report for Businessweek.
“In the past, Google has given device makers early access to versions of Android so they could work on their products,” Vance and Stone report. “It would then typically release the source code to the masses a few months later, letting all comers do what they want with the code.”
MacDailyNews Take: Fragmandroid.
Vance and Stone report, “It’s the throngs of smaller hardware makers and software developers that will now have to wait for the software. The delay will probably be several months. ‘To make our schedule to ship the tablet, we made some design tradeoffs,’ says Andy Rubin, vice-president for engineering at Google and head of its Android group. ‘We didn’t want to think about what it would take for the same software to run on phones. It would have required a lot of additional resources and extended our schedule beyond what we thought was reasonable. So we took a shortcut.'”
MacDailyNews Take: So, who’s going to line up around the block for pretend iPads running an OS that features design tradeoffs and shortcuts?
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple doesn’t take shortcuts.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “chew” for the heads up.]
