As expected, Andy Rubin, VP of Mobile Platforms at Google, took to the stage last night at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference. While Google had announced the Google Nexus S earlier in the day, Rubin had a surprise of his own: A preview of Motorola’s Honeycomb-powered tablet.
Rubin did not share a lot of details but did indicate that it will be powered by a dual-core NVIDIA processor and Honeycomb. Rubin also confirmed that Honeycomb will introduce new functionality specifically for tablets. For example, the tablet version of GMail will have two columns (a list of your emails and the currently selected one) whereas the phone version will continue to use the single column layout.
Part of his demo was done with a new version of Google Maps (featuring vector-based graphics) that should be out within days.
Rubin provided no details as to when Honeycomb and the Motorola tablet will hit the street.