Ina Fried

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Motorola Teases a Honeycomb-based Android Tablet for CES, Stings Rivals

Motorola has posted a video on YouTube hinting at a CES launch for its much-anticipated Android tablet.

The video shows the evolution of tablets, beginning with the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt, which offered good graphics but weighed a little too much for good portability. Other stops on the journey include the Ten Commandments–“Excellent durability, but zero flexibility (can’t edit)”–and the 1989 Grid tablet, with its 20-megabyte hard drive.

From there, Motorola starts taking swipes at the current competition, including the iPad, which it calls a “giant iPhone,” and the Galaxy Tab, which it says is “Android OS, but Android OS for a phone.”

As for Motorola’s tablet, it is shrouded, but a buzzing bee next to a Motorola logo would seem to confirm its use of Honeycomb, the version of Android being explicitly developed for tablets. The video ends with the text “CES 2011.”

Google’s Andy Rubin showed a prototype Honeycomb-based Motorola tablet at last month’s D: Dive Into Mobile conference. He said the device was based on an Nvidia Tegra processor, but shared few other technical details. (If you missed the talk, there’s a video of Rubin’s presentation here).

In a backstage interview with Mobilized, Rubin confirmed that Honeycomb is specifically aimed at tablets, tweaking the Android interface to be better suited to running on larger devices and take advantage of the added screen real estate.

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