Google employee Dave Burke has announced in an interview which features of Android Honeycomb will be available for smartphones. Among other things, the Action Bar and multitasking interface are being made suitable for smartphones.
The Action Bar offers a number of virtual buttons at the top of the screen, which can vary per app. The current Android version for smartphones, Gingerbread, only has a notification bar at the top. The function of long-pressing an element on the screen to bring up additional options becomes superfluous with the Action Bar and will therefore disappear, Burke said. know in an interview with Phonescoop. Smartphones will also have a button that displays thumbnails of open applications, which should make multitasking easier. In addition, visual elements of Honeycomb, which Google calls the Hologram style, would come to smartphones.
Android Honeycomb is made for tablets. Google previously said that the versions for tablets and smartphones will be merged in the next major Android release, but did not provide details yet. This version, which may be released around the summer, will probably be called Ice Cream.
Google is expected to release an interim version for smartphones before the release of Ice Cream. Android 2.4, which will probably be called Gingerbread just like version 2.3, should support apps written for dual-core processors. Google recently released a small update with Android 2.3.3. This release provides expanded support for NFC.