Jan 4, 2011 12:01 GMT  ·  By

Mountain View-based Internet giant Google is hard at work with the development of the next flavor of its Android operating system, dubbed Honeycomb, and some new details on it have just emerged.

Apparently, the new OS iteration would have some minimum requirements put in place, such as the fact that it won't run on lower application processors than a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU.

Moreover, the new Android release might not fit inside smartphones in the beginning, but it would be released only for tablet PCs it seems, being greatly optimized for the larger screens these devices pack.

Apparently, the next Android platform version won't be fit for screens smaller than 7-inches, nor on those that boast a resolution lower than 1280 x 720 pixels. Most probably, 10-inch tablet PCs would be the most common devices with the new OS flavor on board.

These pieces of info come from the director of Enspert, a Korean consumer electronics company which has just released its own tablet PC running under Android, cited by PC Magazine.

Provided that these requirements were indeed put in place for all new devices that would land on the market with the next Android release on board, current devices, such as Samsung Galaxy Tab, or other tablet PCs, won't be upgradeable to Honeycomb.

Nvidia's Tegra 2 platform is the chipset to include a Cortex-A9 processor, and none of the current tablet PCs powered by Android includes it.

However, the first such devices might become official as soon as this week, during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, two days from now.

We already know that Motorola has plans for unveiling such a tablet PC, since the company touted the upcoming device a few times before, and rumor has it that other handset vendors, including LG and Samsung, might also join the party.

It would be interesting to see whether Google has indeed put in place those requirements or not, especially since some previous rumors suggested that Honeycomb wouldn't be too different from Gingerbread.

The company already has another OS aimed at larger screens, the Chrome OS, which fits with netbooks and the like, while the Android platform was meant for the smaller screens of mobile phones.