Android Honeycomb is the most significant release for tablet users because it’s the only release Google explicitly intended for use on tablets, and it has full access to the Android Market. Ice Cream Sandwich was mainly intended to bring the Honeycomb tablet features to phone users.
That isn’t to say that there weren’t devices that tried to hit the market before Honeycomb. ViewSonic had the G-tablet. Samsung released the Galaxy Tab, and Archos introduced a whole line of Android tablets in different sizes. At the time of writing, there are plans to release at least one more pre-Honeycomb device, the HTC Flyer, although it will eventually upgrade to Honeycomb.
The problem is that pre-Honeycomb tablets don’t scale well: apps and widgets are simply larger instead of really taking advantage of the space available, they often require a lot of OS tweaking to work, and third-party apps don’t always behave well. The scalability problem hasn’t been entirely resolved in non-tablet apps, but it has improved.
