Android

Does Google's mobile Android 2.3 operating system, aka Gingerbread, lie beneath its tablet-only Android 3.0 os, aka Honeycomb?


A modder by the name of Graffix0214 has discovered a way to unlock the Gingerbread user interface on his Dell Streak 7 tablet, which runs Honeycomb, by simply changing the system's pixel settings.

Using the app "LCDDensity for Root," he changed the LCD pixel density setting from 160 to above 170, then rebooted. The tablet then displayed a Gingerbread login interface. You can revert back to Honeycomb by simply changing the pixel density back to 160, he said. Check out his demonstration in the video below.

"It's safe to say that Honeycomb wasn't built from the ground up. Looks like it was taken from Gingerbread," Graphix0214 concluded.

Perhaps Android 4.0, codenamed "Ice Cream Sandwich," which isn't expected until the fourth quarter, is already in place. At Mobile World Congress in February, Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested that Ice Cream Sandwich will combine elements of Gingerbread and Honeycomb:

"The two of them – notice that starts with a G and the next one starts with an H. You can imagine the follow-on will start with an I and it will be named after a dessert and it will combine capabilities of both the G and the H release," Schmidt said.

Watch Graphix0214 unlock Gingerbread on a Honeycomb-based Dell Streak 7: