At a press event today for Android 3.0 Honeycomb, one of the most exciting announcements was a web-based store for the Android Market. Most of the Honeycomb features and goodies demonstrated at the event were already known. Check out the video for a refresher:
One of the more exciting announcements was the addition of a website for the Android Market. Now, you can finally browse the market from somewhere other than your actual Android device or a third-party service.
The website makes it easy to discover great new apps with a bigger, brighter interface. You can also send apps directly to your Android device with just a few clicks—no wires needed. We’ve built in new social features, too. You can share apps with your friends through Twitter. And you can read and post app reviews directly to Android Market from the web or from your device.
Speaking of third-party services, sites like AppBrain.com will need to stay ahead of the game if they want to stay in play. It looks like the Android Market web interface covers many of the features that users have become accustomed to from these other sites. At the time of this writing, though, you cannot login to the Market.Android.com site. It throws an “invalid request” error. Let us know if you get in.
Another nice development is the addition of video chat based on GTalk. Now, Android users have an official way to do video chat with other Android and Gmail users just as iPhone and Mac users can chat via Facetime. They demoed the featured by calling up Cee-Lo, which is awesome by itself because it means Cee-Lo has an Android device and…well..it’s Cee-Lo! Unfortunately, he ended the call with a simple “Peace” rather than that “F” word that launched his recent single.
Android 3.0 was built for tablets with larger screens, so it remains to be seen what features we will see in the latest Android 2.2 devices. Hopefully, with Google breaking out many of the features of Android into individual apps on the Market, we may get some 3.0 love without waiting on the carriers to get it together.
via Official Google Mobile Blog