Android Honeycomb may require dual-core, strand Galaxy Tab

Google's requirements for Honeycomb could be so high that they abandon every Android tablet buyer from the past few months, electronics company Enspert's managing director Bobby Cha said on Monday. While a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 chipset like NVIDIA's Tegra 2 is already known to be the reference point, it may now need that performance just to "run properly," according to the Korean executive. He also told PCMag that it would require at least a 720p screen, although seven-inch tablets would be possible alongside 10-inch examples.


The choice would limit the new OS, also known as Android 2.4, to high-end tablets that fetch premium pricing. Enspert is working on tablets running both 2.3 or earlier as well as 2.4 and hinted at an at least temporary fork between the user experience on the high and low end, as low end hardware would be forced to use a non-optimized platform. The newer OS would only come to lower-end tablets once the parts were inexpensive enough to bring Honeycomb into the mainstream, Cha said.

Google declined to comment. However, companies including Motorola, LG, HTC and Samsung are all known to be basing their Android 2.4 tablets on the same Tegra 2 processor and are known to be using 720p or denser displays.

If accurate, the decision would see Google desert millions of early Android tablet adopters. While it warned that pre-Honeycomb builds weren't optimized for tablets, it has made no mention of these users being unable to upgrade to the newer OS. It could leave up to 1.5 million buyers without any option of upgrading to the new OS on the Samsung Galaxy Tab despite the slate being just four months old at the very first supporting carriers.

More details of how Honeycomb/Android 2.4 works, as well as the first tablets to use it, should be public at CES within the next two days. Some of these tablets won't ship until mid-year. Many will be positioned as iPad rivals, although it's unknown if Apple will up its performance and display features on the next iPad; it's unlikely to require dual-core as it only just launched the first iPad last year.

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