Despite there being several Android Honeycomb tablets due out shortly, Google is delaying releasing the tablet-specific software to the developer community.
In an article by Bloomberg, Google Vice President for engineering Andy Rubin said “To make our schedule to ship the tablet, we made some design tradeoffs”. He added “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.”
It seems then that Google have cut corners in order to try and get ahead in the Tablet Market before Apple could announce the iPad 2, but now they are facing the drawbacks.
Rubin went on to explain that if Google released Honeycomb to developers, there would be nothing stopping them from using it on mobile phones. Due to Google rushing Honeycomb out as a Tablet-specific OS, they can’t guarantee it will work well on mobile phones. In Rubin’s words, Honeycomb could cause “a really bad user experience”, and they “have no idea if it will even work on phones”.