HONEYCOMB 3.1

With the current release of Honeycomb 3.1, some of you may want to know first what’s in it before you decide to subject your device to an immediate update. Here’s a rundown of some of the best features of the new Android tablet OS.

First up is the hardware support. This new update seems to blur the line between a PC and a tablet a little bit. Honeycomb 3.1 now supports USB devices as hosts, what this means is that your USB will not only be used to plug in your tablet to your PC but now lets you plug-in USB devices to your tablet such as thumb drive / flash drives, cameras, keyboards and gamepads. So you can immediately upload files or photos when you’re running low on storage space on your camera or thumb drive. What’s more, you can even play your favorite Android games like it was a game console.

Aside from the wired support (USB Host), the new update also allows you to use a vast number of pointer devices like mouse, trackballs and touchpads via Bluetooth. It also supports bluetooth keyboards as well.

For the software, there are lots of improvements made to make the user experience better. The new update now features better multi tasking, instead of the static stack that was limited to show only 4 apps, you can now see more recent apps by scrolling up and down the apps you’ve recently opened. Widgets now can be resized to make better use of the desktop space. Simply hold your finger over the widget and a blue frame with diamonds on the corners will appear, the diamonds act as handles for you to resize the width or height of the widget.

Core Apps also had some minor updates. The email widget now allows you to access multiple folders. A redesigned Calendar is now easier to read and has more accurate controls. Contacts are now fully searchable. Plus there is a new movies app that lets you rent thousands of movies.

Other non-cosmetic changes to the OS that takes advantage of the hardware acceleration of the new tablets, include a better browser with support to HTML5 embedded videos and better Flash 10.3. Watching Youtube on the browser just got better with less stuttering and smoother 360p videos and better 720p.

Overall this would be a worthwhile update that improves Honeycomb’s usability and even better for those who want to take advantage of their tablet’s good specs.