Honeycomb 3.1

Honeycomb 3.1 includes several new features to improve the Web browsing and user experience for tablets such as the Motorola Xoom. The upgrade has rolled out on the Verizon 3G-powered Xoom.

Honeycomb widgets are nice and customizable, but Google is letting developers create widgets that users may resize horizontally and vertically.

Cleron showed how the USB host API will let users plug a game controller into the Xoom to play “Cordy,” a game that comes preloaded on the tablet.

Theres good news for Google TV users. The Honeycomb 3.1 upgrade is coming to Google TV later this summer.

More importantly, Google is opening the Android Market to Google TV apps at the same time. Also, Sony, Logitech, Vizio and Samsung are releasing new Google TV products this summer.

Cleron said Google will release Ice Cream Sandwich, the follow-up to Gingerbread, in the fourth quarter this year. This will deliver Near Field Communications capability combined with choice graphical features.

The idea is to unify the Honeycomb tablet and Gingerbread smartphone OS builds to curb the version fragmentation of Android.

Honeycomb will eventually let users tilt their screens by moving their head, as seen in this demo. This comes from Google’s Technology Extraction Team based in Roswell, N.M.—no fooling.

In this use case, the Xoom tablet camera zeros in on where the user’s head is and can modify the way the user’s face looks on the Xoom.

In another cool feature, Google has added voice-activated video chat that pans the camera focus to the speaker on a tablet.