Game developers showcased Honeycomb, Google's new Android 3.0 and the new Xoom tablets to best advantage. Two developers showed off games that they said that Apple would have no chance of running on the current iPad.

Android's tablet future is clearly in games.

Say what you will about Android 3.0's core interface - - the combination of the Motorola Xoom's dual-core interface and the new Google RenderScript 3D API is a powerful combination.

Following the , reporters attending the event had the opportunity to check out a dozen or two apps that are being optimized for the new operating system. While many of them simply take advantage of the larger form factor the tablets enable, several game developers showcased Honeycomb and the new tablets to best advantage. (You can check out , too.)

Although Apple reportedly is prepping a of the current iPad, several developers said that the current generation of Apple hardware doesn't even come close to the , which includes a dual-core 1-GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 chip for improved performance.

Trendy Entertainment, for example, showed its "Dungeon Defenders" game, which has been ported to the PlayStation 3 and the Microsoft Xbox Live Arcade. The power of the Tegra 2 means that coding a mobile version of the game for the Xoom is basically a "1:1 port", executives said.

"As you can see it's running 30, 40 frames per second," said Agapitus "Agie" Lye, the chief executive of Trendy. "With Android iPhone version there's about 20 on-screen enemies at once. With the new operating system, we can put up to 50."

Xoom "twice" the power of the iPad

Trendy develops both for iOS as well as for Android, but Lye said that Apple doesn't have anything that will compete. The Xoom has about "twice" the horsepower of the iPad, Lye said. When asked how the iPad 2 will compare, Lye said that the Tegra 2 will still surpass what the iPad 2 brings to market.

Executives at War Drum Studios, which works next door to Trendy in Gainesville, Florida, also praised the new Android tablet. "Great Battles: Medieval" looks quite a bit like the "Total War" series of games, with individual soldiers battling on a 3D battlefield. In the demonstration War Drum showed off, over 500 individual soldiers were modeled on the battlefield, with no redundant animations, said Thomas Williamson, the company's chief executive. In total, there are probably about 300,000 to 400,000 polygons, he said.

And would his game run on the iPad? "No way, no way," Williamson said. "If this ran on the current generation iPad, it would be about 2, 3 frames per second".

Williamson said that Google's Android facilitates games updates as it allows incremental updates that can written to an SD card. New iOS builds must be essentially zipped up into a new build, he said.

The problem for consumers is that these games will likely carry with them a minimum specification, just like their PC cousins. That might be prove to be an annoyance for those mobile gamers used to downloading games for their iPhone or iPad, whose hardware changes only from generation to generation.

However, other developers are taking a more cautious approach, at least at first. Zynga, for example, showed off Words with Friends, a Scrabble-like word game. Zynga, which breaks out its game development into separate studios within the company, assigns a different studio to some its other more well-known titles, such as "Farmville" or "Cityville".

"We have a number of current titles that we'll be bringing to Android," a Zynga spokeswoman said.

NGmoco was also on hand, showing off an Android port of its game "We Rule".