Joshua Topolsky sat down with Android’s head of user experience, Matias Duarte to talk about Android 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ and the general Android philosophy.

Some of the quotes which I found interesting were:

On Honeycomb we cheated, we cut the corner of all that smaller device support. That’s the sole reason we haven’t open sourced it.

Honeycomb was like: we need to get tablet support out there. We need to build not just the product, but even more than the product, the building blocks so that people stop doing silly things like taking a phone UI and stretching it out to a 10-inch tablet.

I guess this was aimed at all the manufacturers who were releasing tablets with Android 2.x. Funny part is that the manufacturers are still releasing tablets with Android 2.x but these tablets are now relegated to either low-end or mid range segment. The irony however is that these tablets are still preferred over Honeycomb tablets because of the lack of quality apps on Honeycomb.

With Android, people were not responding emotionally, they weren’t forming emotional relationships with the product. They needed it, but they didn’t necessarily love it.

Interesting point! Completely agree with Martias here though.