I am writing these words on a foldable tablet that fits in my pocket, but my dream of a big touchscreen goes back to a much older era of Android tablets. All the way back to the beginning, in fact, when Google unveiled the first version of Android made for larger screens.
Android 3.0 was a tablet-only version of Android
Codename: Honeycomb
Android first launched in 2008 on the HTC Dream, a device known in the US as the T-Mobile G1. This initial 1.0 release didn’t have a name, but version 1.5 would be known as “Cupcake.” By the time 2.0 came around, the alphabetical dessert-based naming scheme had reached “Eclair.” Version 2.3 launched in 2011 with the name “Gingerbread,” and at the same time, it came to phones; Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” was appearing exclusively on tablets. Despite the version number, this was actually the eighth version of Android released in four years.
Honeycomb was a notable departure from prior versions of Android. It introduced elements that would stick with the platform for a decade, such as the three virtual navigation icons in the bottom left for “back,” “home,” and “recent apps.” Pressing that last one brought up thumbnails of your most recently used apps, arranged vertically.
In the bottom-right, there was a notification area, clock, and system indicators. The design made Android resemble a conventional PC, though there was no taskbar, and to launch apps, you tapped a button in the top-right. Widgets could be arranged anywhere on the home screen.
This was an era of wildly experimental hardware
We weren’t yet sure what a tablet could be
Honeycomb was a response to the commercial success of Apple’s iPad, which hit store shelves nearly a year prior in April of 2010. The iPad had changed people’s concept of a tablet from a Windows machine with a stylus to something more akin to an extra-large phone, and other consumer tech companies wanted in on the action.
Many novel Android tablets came out during this time. The first was the Motorola Xoom, a largely conventional tablet by today’s standards. As a launch product, it gave a good look at the software that virtually all Android tablets released in 2012 would share. This deep dive by MobileTechReview offers a good look.
One of the most striking tablets to follow the Motorola Xoom was the Asus Transformer, whose keyboard attachment effectively turned this slate into a laptop. This was a proper keyboard and touchpad, mind you, not a keyboard case as is common today. Here is a review Marques Brownlee posted back in the tablet’s prime (see what I did there?).
I got my first taste of Honeycomb with the Toshiba Thrive, a 10-inch tablet released over the summer with a removable back cover, an SD card slot, an HDMI port, and a USB 3.0 port. All of these ports were full-sized, just like on a laptop. This made it easy to back up files, copy photos over from my point-and-shoot digital camera, and print papers from campus printers. I wish I still had a photo of the tablet, but alas, for this one, I will point you toward a PhoneArena review instead.
Samsung had the most success, for it had already started releasing tablets based on the phone version of Android in 2010. The dominance it was rapidly establishing among Android phones continued on into tablets. As much as I love Samsung hardware now, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Honeycomb tablet did nothing for me. It was thinner than the iPad, but it sacrificed the ports I was looking for in the process.
The Tron-like interface worked surprisingly well
But where were the apps?
Android Honeycomb looked the same across all of these tablets. The virtual buttons, the settings menu, and various parts of the interface were blue and black. It’s striking now to look back and see how dark Android once was.
Android Honeycomb was certainly usable. I spent much of my junior year of college using my Toshiba Thrive as a laptop replacement (after all, it had the ports!). The interface was rarely an issue for me, as someone who finds certain restrictions on multitasking actually help me stay on task. You could not move Android apps like PC app windows in those days. There wasn’t even split-screen multitasking. But the tablets were powerful and smooth enough to get work done. The problem was the apps.
Honeycomb introduced apps tailored to larger screens, like a Gmail app that had a sidebar on the left and email threads on the right. Unfortunately, there just weren’t many apps that took advantage of the larger screen. Most of the apps were phone apps stretched to fill the larger space. I remember downloading a basic office suite and a PDF reader that I used for my classes, but there wasn’t much more available. Android tablets may still lack apps relative to the iPad, but they’ve come a long way.
Android 4.0 was the beginning of the end
Merging phones and tablets back together did not bode well for tablets
Credit: Android Developers
For Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich,” Google merged the phone and tablet versions together. Rather than phones running Gingerbread and tablets running Honeycomb looking radically different, the software would look similar across both devices. Unfortunately for tablets, the devices would function similarly as well. This meant that instead of having a bottom, taskbar-like panel, tablets now had three virtual buttons at the bottom and a ton of wasted space, and there became even less incentive for developers to make tablet-specific versions of apps.
Surprisingly quickly, the number of Android tablets began to dwindle. Google would soon release the beloved Nexus 7 and the less well-received Nexus 10, but even if it didn’t put much heart into developing Android tablets. Even now, the relatively mid-range Pixel Tablet, released in 2023, remains the newest tablet from Google. For many years, Android tablets were largely synonymous with Samsung Galaxy Tabs.
These days, Lenovo offers Samsung the most consistent competition, though the OnePlus Pad may offer the best bang for your buck. Then there are the wildly niche devices, like E Ink Android tablets, that keep me choosing Android tablets over the iPad. That said, there’s a case to be made that the best Android tablet you can buy isn’t a tablet at all, but a book-style foldable phone. The 7.6-inch screen on my Galaxy Z Fold 6 is larger than that of the Nexus 7 that showed me how much I preferred a smaller tablet in first place.
The Honeycomb era only lasted a year, but it was a period in time where electronics stores were packed with quirky Android hardware all running a new and distinct version of Android. For many of us, Honeycomb ran on the first tablets we ever owned. I wouldn’t argue that those tablets were better—they weren’t—but it was an exciting time to see just what this new form factor had to offer.
