The 10 Best Apps for Android 3.0 Honeycomb

BARCELONA—This year's Mobile World Congress is the first big coming-out party for tablets running Google's Android Honeycomb operating system, and Google's huge booth was crammed full of Honeycomb apps. I was impressed by how some of the apps leveraged tablets' big screens to offer new experiences that are impossible on phones. That's the kind of thinking the platform will need to succeed.

I picked 10 of the top Honeycomb apps for this slideshow. They include a multi-party video conferencing app from Fuze Meeting which spawns way too many windows for a phone; Great Battles Medieval, a strategy game that would look impossibly cramped on a phone; and Pulse News, which uses the big screen to provide a broad view of news feeds from many different Web sites.

Most phone apps will absolutely run on Android Honeycomb, and they'll run better than iPhone apps do on the iPad. I saw several top Gingerbread apps, including Facebook and Pandora, running on Honeycomb tablets. Generally, the user interfaces get a lot of blank space in them. But the fonts are still sharp, and the UIs work. There wasn't any of the graininess you see in "blown up" iPhone apps on the iPad.

Honeycomb tablets are coming soon, with the first one, the Motorola Xoom, rumored for arrival later this month on Verizon Wireless. Take a look at my 10 best Honeycomb apps (in no particular order) in this slideshow.

 

Google Earth for Honeycomb

Google Earth looks terrific on Honeycomb tablets. The view isn't cramped at all, and you feel like you're really swooping over the 3D buildings and terrain.

Fuze Meeting

Fuze Meeting offers multi-party video conferencing and collaborative meeting software on Honeycomb. Over a Wi-Fi connection, it's pretty smooth.

Intuit GoPayment

Intuit's new GoPayment app, along with a dongle that attaches to the Motorola Xoom tablet, lets Honeycomb tablets read credit cards and take payments.

WeatherBug

WeatherBug's weather app has been rewritten for Honeycomb. The sliding weather panels aren't the big draw for me, but the temperature heat map makes good use of the big screen.

Great Battles Medieval

There were half a dozen Honeycomb games at the Google booth. Great Battles Medieval had the grandest sweep, using the tablet's big screen to show a battlefield full of enemies in a way that just wouldn't work on a phone.

LogMeIn

The big screens of Honeycomb tablets let them act as windows to full deskop PCs. LogMeIn is a virtual desktop app that can show what's happening back on your computer at work.

QuickOffice

QuickOffice is bringing Microsoft Office compatible apps to Honeycomb. Here, a demonstrator is editing an Excel spreadsheet, including inserting a new formula.

CNN

CNN's Honeycomb app turns the venerable news Web site into a virtual magazine. Stories have text, images and video mixed in.

YouTube

Google's own YouTube looks great on Honeycomb. With the added screen real estate, you can watch a video and search for the next one to watch at the same time.

Pulse News

Pulse News uses a big Honeycomb screen to make RSS reading a more visual experience. When you open a story, meanwhile, your feeds can stay visible on the left hand side.