Video And Screenshots Of Android 3.0′s Surprise Appearance

The best things I take away from this video:<p>1. The new Google Maps is coming out in the next few days for Android phones and it looks SLICK. Pure vector graphics when looking at standard map views, which will greatly reduce bandwidth.<p>2. The gmail app in 3.0 looks slick, perhaps even slicker than the Mail app for iPad.<p>3. It seems as though we're going to be able to have one binary for both phones and tablets, and the device will automatically detect which device it is and work accordingly.

The video is worth a watch. The part where he tilts the 2D map into a 3D perspective is awesome. Apparently, they are using vectors instead of tiled images which allows them to now do touch rotations and other cool stuff.

Their vector implementation of Maps will making it a lot more usable, if you can cache a whole route's worth of map data beforehand: -no worrying about getting lost right outside data coverage -people without data plans can precache data while still on Wifi (smartphones without a data plan aren't that common among normals as far as I know, though it'd be bad news for GPS companies if it comes out for the iPod Touch any time soon)

A few silly observations:<p>1. They bested Apple at their own game: it has no hardware buttons. Rubin even mentions that the single iPad button can get disorienting at times.<p>2. The thing costs $10,000! So much for the Apple tax. Let's start complaining about the Google tax!

From that video it seems like Android still has performance issues compared to the iOS. The scrolling looked choppy and had a noticeable lag. Presumably this can be fixed, but I am always surprised that some phones still can't master smooth, no-lag scrolling, given that it is provably doable.<p>It's also amazing how much they copied from iOS. Almost everything about that Android tablet is a blatant copy of the iPad. Look at the Gmail app, for instance.<p>In the 80s Microsoft got big by commoditizing Apple's innovations and it looks like Google is going to do the same in mobile. As a consumer I'm not complaining, but Steve Jobs must be going crazy.

3:57 (talking about whether the map would also run on "other people's operating system")<p><i>Have a group of engineers, they can only do so much.</i><p>I have feeling that the Maps app on iOS will not be updated for a long long time after Honeycomb. Apple was wise to look into building their own map app, just like it was wise to purchase Final Cut.

I'm guessing that the dual core chip on this android device might be a derivative of the NVIDIA Tegra. Although this wouldn't make sence that the GPU is off the die?

I wonder how well the caching will work. I currently use MapDroyd ( <a href="http://www.mapdroyd.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mapdroyd.com/</a> ) for cached vector maps. Maybe now I can just use Google Maps and not need a second maps app installed for when I lose my data connection.