By Well this is interesting. A crafty hacker was messing around with some of his configuration files and tried tinkering with the LCD density on his Honeycomb tablet. When setting it to anything above 160, he was met with a very interesting result – the tablet-friendly Honeycomb interface transforms into the Gingerbread interface.
We’re not exactly sure why Google left bits of ginger inside Honeycomb and why it was so easy to uncover, but we aren’t complaining. And we can’t imagine any of you will have any real use for this, but it’s always nice to uncover peculiar stuff. Check it out in the video above. Use LCDDensity for Root on any rooted Honeycomb tablet to try it yourself. [Engadget]
Alternate title: Why Google hasn’t released source code yet.
They’ve actually released the sources for the items they are obliged to release under the GPL. And it’s pretty obvious if you’ve used a HC device that it simply isn’t ready (so Google don’t want to release the full source until it’s ready).
Fake Steve Jobs again?
No that’s the real Steve Jobs
Real as it gets son, buy an iPhone.
Real Steve Jobs spamming an android blog made my day, thanks
agreed. Kind of blows the whole “built from the ground up” thing out of the water… this is definitely the reason source isn’t released. It would be too embarrassing
Because if you were paying attention Google stated at this years i/o that they didn’t want 3.0 ported to handhelds as its was not their intention for honeycomb. They are holding on to it until ICS is released and then release the source code for that.
‘We’re not exactly sure why Google left bits of ginger inside Honeycomb and why it was so easy to uncover, but we aren’t complaining. And we can’t imagine any of you will have any real use for this, but it’s always nice to uncover peculiar stuff’
Probably as a precusor before ICS was decided to be a seperate version rather than an update of HC.
Also changing your LCD density really isn’t crafty hacking.
“Also changing your LCD density really isn’t crafty hacking.” I know.
So is this good or bad???
It a simple development process every software takes. Nothing new or surprising.
1. let’s build honeycomb based of 2.3 or 2.2 or whatever they had at that time.
2. Let’s make this come up just for tablets.. so if you have a higher res device you get all the fancy pretty new stuff. We worry about phones later because we don’t have time right now.
3. Let’s not touch the current stuff, so the current apps work fine. Just “maximized”.
4. Once we release Honeycomb let’s start building what we did for smaller density/resolution devices. (I’m pretty sure that’s what they are doing now)
5. Since we used the same code, our development process will be easier.
6. Once we finish the new UI (Holographic is called) for phones, let’s release it.
7. Hold off the source code, because since you can still run this on phones, we know stupid OEMs will fuck it up and release “The first Android 3.0 phone” with an incomplete UI. And this will be obviously Google’s fault. (You know OEMs keep fucking up stuff)
This is not bad… this just shows that they based Honeycomb of 2.3 or 2.2. They must be working on bringing the new UI to phones sized screens now.
I’ve seen this in Engadget too, and I just can’t see how is this relevant or “news”.
It’s like opening a terminal in OSX and see some UNIX commands. “O MY GOD, there’s Unix commands in here. WHat’s going on?!?”
on my LG GW620, I set the LCD density to 128. So if I get ICS on this phone, will I end up with the tablet UI? :P
I hope it’s as practical as it sounds.
I saw it already when Google released the SDK. If you create an emulator with low resolution, it will look like gingerbread.. At first I thought I messed up..
Not exactly news, people have seen that from running the SDK in the emulator since the early previews in january.
it actually looks more like Froyo with Ginger icons. the white status bar & the rounded edges on the launcher are all Froyo, but it has the green globe and call icon.
does this mean if i set gingerbread to anything below 160 ill get honeycomb….. hmmm…. wouldn’t that be nice
Thats what I was thinking… If google is two combine all three OS’s (GTV, Tablet, and Phone) with just different interfaces but all the same OS then this would make sense to be part of Ice Cream Sandwich.
Really Imagine making a device of a specific size and then just have your software automatically create a UI that is a best fit for your device based on the pixel density. I think this is good, I may be completely off base but definitely an option…
Lol honeycomb turns out to be a gingerbread wrapper. Maybe this is what they meant by ‘taking shortcuts in order to decrease time to market’ and didn’t want to release source.
And it’s a legit way to get 2 OS registrations off of one device, creating that who’s marketshare perception that has been their strategy for the past year.
Android marketing plan:
1. Sell them
2. If you can’t sell them, lower the price a little.
3. If price reduction doesn’t work, give them 2 for the price if 1.
4. If they don’t think one for free is a good deal give them 2 free for every 1 purchased.
5. If they don’t have money or can’t afford a phone, give it to them free for signing a 2 year carrier agreement.
6. Sell android tablets
7. If they won’t buy them, reduce the price.
8. If they still won’t but them, reduce the price and give them a free phone.
9. Wait we are all out of free phones, make sure the gingerbread OS will register itself as a separate platform than honeycomb. We will give the ones who will a free ‘phone’ they don’t even know about.
Lol I’m just kidding you guys. I know android is a good produce, and like every good product that is new…it has it’s kinks, but will shine when it’s polished.
Im totally in jest….
10. What do you mean they still arent selling? Well give 5000 of them away today to someone. What do you mean to who? Hell I don’t know, people who would like free stuff…those developer people, there you go. Give 5000 away to them, and we just sold 10000 androids today….let met know when the registrations come in.
This is a natural result of the way that Android application resources work. It sounds like on Honeycomb they only tweaked the layout resources for the display that it was, rather than the infinite number of displays that it wasn’t. The thing is that Android is designed to be a unified OS with unified applications, and if your hardware is lying about what it is, then there’s no point getting upset when the software believes the hardware and tries to do the best that it can in the situation.
So this isn’t new, we found this out a long time ago using the emulator in the SDK. Also, it more resembles FroYo, but who cares. As for people saying “guess Google didn’t build it from the ground up” you are retarded. Google never said they built it from the ground up, what would the point be anyways? They redesigned it from the ground up, and that’s no lie. Also, this is not the reason they withheld the source code, this little example is actually a nice example of what Ice Cream Sandwich will be. They withheld the source code because they did not want people porting the Honeycomb UI to handhelds. Regardless of everything, this should not be surprising, do you think anyone rebuilds a complete operating system whenever they release the next version? Are you that stupid? C’mon guys, quit filling this site with such stupid comments that make it look like an idiot’s playground…
It seems like they did this specifically so that if people managed to put honeycomb on a phone the ui wouldn’t be all messed up they would still be able to use it. I assume there’s still some things to work out which is why they haven’t released everything yet.
I imagine this is something similar to how icecream will be able to work on tablets tvs and phones… 36 ppi~ tv interface, 160 ~phone interface, inbetween ~tablet.
Obviously it needs to be a better system than that but it makes sense to me that they would have built that in seeing as how worried they were about people putting honeycomb on a phone.
What’s with all of these geeks spending thousands of dollars on tablets and phones, but can’t spend $200 on a decent motion video camera?
Hmm. Not doing it on a honeycomb’d GTablet.
I lied! I had to set the gTab up over 190 though…
I wouldnt say I was crafty just nosy :)