What Will Google's Honeycomb Look Like on Other Tablets?

Google's Honeycomb event yesterday showcased the much-awaited, tablet-focused Android 3.0—but did the Motorola Xoom showcase what Honeycomb will look like on all those tablets announced at CES?
Until yesterday, most of what we'd seen consisted of mock-ups, video demos, and beta versions of the operating system. The event may not have been a jaw-dropping experience for viewers, but I took two main points away from it: the ability to purchase and sync Android apps on the Web is an excellent development, and the Honeycomb user interface looks beautiful and well-designed. This got me thinking, however: is this what we'll really experience on Honeycomb tablets?
I have no doubt that the Motorola Xoom will feature the sleek, smoothly functioning pure version of Honeycomb that was demoed at the event, but the question is: will any other tablet? If you are familiar with Android 2.1 and 2.2 tablets, one common theme is: many manufacturers build customized user interfaces for Android.
Sometimes, it's subtle—a different keyboard, slightly different menus. But often, it is unrecognizable. Samsung's Galaxy Tab user interface looks nothing like Archos tablet interfaces, which look different than the Dell Streak 7's user interface. Sure, they all offer fairly similar basic functionality, but at the high end (Samsung) things look great and run smoothly, and at the other end of the scale (Archos), we have a slower user interface with lesser graphics.
So why do manufacturers customize and visually re-imagine a perfectly decent Android OS? Prior to Honeycomb, the tablets running Android (which are still the only Android tablets currently available) had to be customized: Andriod 2.1 - 2.3 is made for phones, not larger screens, and thus the unadulterated version of Android would look horrible on any tablet-sized screen. Now that Honeycomb, in its pure form, is designed to work with larger tablet screens, the days of manufacturers creating customized UIs for the Android OS should be over, right? Not so fast.
While Google's Android Open Source lead, Dan Morrill, tweeted in January that there would be no "minimum processor requirement" to run Honeycomb, manufacturers beg to differ. Just as you could load an un-customized version of 2.2 onto a tablet and have it look horrible, manufacturers claim that in order for Honeycomb to run smoothly like it did in yesterday's demos, there are some basic hardware requirements that not every tablet announced at CES is likely to get. Enspert, a Korean consumer electronics company, claims that Honeycomb requires a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor or it won't perform properly. And in order for graphics to look as nice as they do on the Xoom, the ideal screen resolution seems to be 1,280-by-720 (minimum). For reference, the Samsung Galaxy Tab's screen is 1,024-by-600.
So, Google isn't lying to us, but not all manufacturers are going to spend the money to make Honeycomb live up to its full potential. Instead of a sea of custom UI, low-end, poorly functioning tablets—which is, with very few exceptions, what we currently have in the pre-Honeycomb Android tablet world—I predict three seas, two of which will be ugly.
The nice sea will be sparsely populated—the Xoom will lead the way as the first tablet to run Honeycomb, un-customized, and soon we will hear from Samsung and other mainstream consumer electronics companies. They will likely offer custom UI versions of Android Honeycomb, despite Honeycomb looking great on its own, as a way to differentiate. It may not matter, because these manufacturers likely have the revenue to pull off a smooth, fully functional re-skinned UI.
The ugly territory will be divided into two realms. One part will consist of tablets that don't run customized Honeycomb, but lack the proper processors and screens to take full advantage of Honeycomb. On these tablets, expect Honeycomb to run slowly, or for screens to react slowly to your touch and look low-res. A good portion of tablets at CES didn't even have full multi-touch displays. For these tablets, you will see pictures on the box and in ads of a screen running the good-looking Honeycomb interface, but your own experience with Honeycomb will not be smooth like yesterdays demo. Regardless of what Google says, if there's no dual-core A9 in there, you can bet on performance issues.
The other group of ugly tablets will look much like the current crop of 2.1 and 2.2 tablets: customized UIs with dumbed-down graphics that won't challenge less powerful processors and won't require a higher resolution screen.
Make no mistake: Honeycomb is something to be excited about. But like all open platforms, Android will look and behave wonderfully on some systems and abysmally on others. Look for the large field of tablets to dwindle to a smaller group of survivors a year from now, when most manufacturers realize, even with an open system, they can't compete with bigger companies and their larger budgets.