LAS VEGAS - Google on Wednesday took to the stage at Verizon's Consumer Electronics Show keynote to show off its updated Android Honeycomb mobile OS.
The company also posted a YouTube video demo of the OS (below).
Google's Mike Cleron demonstrated Honeycomb on an unnamed tablet. With Honeycomb, Google spent over a year thinking about how to rebuild Android from the ground-up, he said. Google "focused on taking all the things people already love about Android and making them richer."
Google worked to make its widgets more powerful and focused a lot of effort on making customization and multi-tasking more seamless. Indeed, multi-tasking worked quite well during the demo – a line of previously used apps were on the left-hand side of the screen, and Cleron picked up where he left off in a game of Dungeon Defenders just by tapping the preview pane.
Cleron also showed off Gmail, which has been redesigned for tablets, and his demo of a Google Maps that tilts, zooms, and rotates got a few oohs and aahs from the crowd. Notifications, meanwhile, now carry more information, like a person's photo.
Earlier today, Google's Android Open Source lead Dan Morrill tweeted that there is no "hard minimum processor requirement" to run Android Honeycomb, the new tablet-centric Google OS.