Jan 21, 2011 16:25 GMT  ·  By

In early 2011, during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Mountain View-based Internet giant Google announced officially a new version of Android, one that would arrive on the market only on tablet PCs for the time being, the Android 3.0 Honeycomb platform.

Since Android was released in the first place for mobile phones, many were expecting to learn that the first smartphones to run under this OS flavor are on their way to the market later during the ongoing year, but it seems that Google might have other plans in this area.

Apparently, the platform was meant only for tablets, and it might never arrive on handsets, at least not under the present form.

“Right now it's a tablet operating system,” Dave Burke, Director of Engineering of Android at Google said referring to the Android 3.0 Honeycomb platform, a recent article on TechRadar reads.

According to him, the platform was built specifically to fit these devices: “We took the opportunity with Android 3.0 to enhance the UI.”

In all fairness, this is not something new. Ever since the first tablet PCs that would run under the Android 3.0 Honeycomb platform version were officially unveiled, Google has been touting the platform as “built from the ground up for tablets.”

This means that Honeycomb would be different from the Android 2.3 Gingerbread platform version currently available for mobile phones, though the future would bring them together.

“I think that coming together is a good idea. What we're trying to do here I make a base platform that's so good, that others only need to add native elements in their core areas,” Burke said.

“We wanted to make the whole UI better - it shouldn't be necessary to customize the texting widget with the Honeycomb UI. We don't think one size fits all with Android, but sometimes changes [people make to the UI] miss the point - then again, sometimes it amazes us.”

Some of the previous rumors suggested that the next Android release, 2.4, might be codenamed Gingerbread too, and it seems that those rumors might just pan out.

However, it remains to be seen how would Android evolve, especially if Google would be set to make the same OS flavor available on both smartphones and tablet PCs.