Switching between mobile and desktop modes
It’s amazing how little Android Jelly Bean information has leaked to the net up to now.
I mean – Android 4/Ice Cream Sandwich is officially out for more the 4 months already. Google has talked about it since May.
And all we have for the next version of Google’s mobile OS is the Jelly Bean name? And that weird report in Digitimes last week, about Jelly Bean Q2 launch and dual booting on Windows 8 tablets?
It ain’t much, but thanks’ to a bunch of inaccuracies in Digitimes post, we may now have the first real bit of info about Android Jelly Bean.
In his latest weekly column Eldar Murtazin couldn’t let the crap, like the next Android iteration being another tablet focused OS version, go unnoticed. Relax – it won’t happen, he says. Honeycomb was a forced measure, and Google will not do this kind of thing to its platform again.
And those Win 8/Android dual booting tablets? According to Eldar they are “in the realm of science fiction”. Digitimes sources must have confused one of the new features in Jelly Bean with dual booting/instant switch between Windows and Android.
Google is working to make Atrix like docking support a standard feature in Android 5. Put your Jelly Bean running Android smartphone into a compatible lapdock – and your mobile apps seamlessly switch to their desktop versions, for a full blown notebook computer experience.
Those rumors about incorporation of Chrome OS elements into Android? Sounds to me that lap-docking in Android 5 is at fault here too. Incorporating elements of Chrome OS into Android 5, for easy switching between mobile and desktop modes, just makes too much sense.
Such integration usually sounds great on paper, and is much harder to implement in real life. As the failure of Motorola’s Atrix lapdocks showed us last year.
But a couple of years of Moore’s law has already improved chip performance and brought component prices down. And this time mobile/desktop switching is not just an app on top of Android. It is a native part of OS – which should make things work more smoothly.
With Motorola becoming a hardware division of Google soon, I hope they will finally pull this converged vision off. If they do – we might see some very interesting smartphone/tablet/laptop combos this fall.
And even hear something about it during Google I/O conference in June.
