Google says that its Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” is suitable for tablets only, and the company won’t be releasing the source code because that would allow developers to put the software on smartphones. “To make our schedule to ship the tablet, we made some design tradeoffs,” says Google’s Andy Rubin. “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.” He adds that they didn’t want to create “a really bad user experience. We have no idea if it will even work on phones.”
Despite closing the source for this version of Android, Rubin asserts, “Android is an open-source project. We have not changed our strategy.”
