Review: Android
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 19th Dec 2011 20:11 UTC
Google Once upon a time, in a land, far, far away, there were two mobile operating systems. One of them was designed for mobile from the ground up; the other was trying really hard to copy its older, desktop brother. One was limited in functionality, inflexible and lacked multitasking, but was very efficient, fast, and easy to use. The other had everything and the kitchen sink, was very flexible and could multitask, but had a steep learning curve, was inconsistent, and not particularly pretty.
E-mail Print r 6   · Read More · 100 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/jmo
Thread beginning with comment 500604
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Some comments
by JAlexoid on Tue 20th Dec 2011 02:14 UTC
JAlexoid
Member since:
2009-05-19

The notification tray also houses the music player controls when you're listening to music

This is Samsung's addition and ICS has that well integrated.

Then there's orientation switching

Also fixed in ICS

Android just doesn't know what to do with all the options it delivers, leading to scrollable tab bars

This is still the case, but ICS handles that with a swipe. See Android Market as an example, but a bit better.

interfaces for copy/paste are also confusing

Fixed that in ICS.

There's no excuse for not implementing bounce-back scrolling in your Android application when Android itself clearly supports it. The fact that Android even gives you the option is bad enough as it is.

Android supports fadelight effect, not bounceback. The bounceback is Samsung's copy from iOS(or wherever)

This way, if you accidentally 'freeze' an application you shouldn't have, you can simply unfreeze it and be on your merry way.

Disabling applications in ICS works exactly like that.

So, if you have two or more new emails, it just shows something along the lines of "thomholwerda@osnews.com (2)", without actually providing information on the contents of these emails. On iOS, each new email gets its own entry, making it easier to see just what your new emails are about.

If you did have the same thing as in iOS it would overload your notifications. And Android does not group anything, apps themselves chose how to show notifications.

While opening activities from another application and hopping back is easy and fluent, switching between applications as a whole is just as annoying on Android as it is on iOS. You long-press the home button, and a dialog pops up containing the icons of the six most recently used applications. It's a little bit worse than iOS, even, since you're limited to those six applications, whereas on iOS you can scroll back pretty far.

The number of activities opened in the task list is more like webOS cards. You can scroll through a long list of activities with previews and swipe away. For you ICS will not relieve the need to long press the home button, however... As a Galaxy Nexus and Nexus S owner, the recent apps button is a great design consideration...

Ice Cream Sandwich was released exactly two months ago, and yet, there's not a single device out there other than the Galaxy Nexus which runs it.

My Nexus S is on ICS as I write this. BTW: Source was released a month and 6 days ago(14th Nov).


PS: Your "next" smartphone will be SGS2 with ICS on it. Because ICS transforms Android into something much better than previously was available.

Reply Score: 5

RE: Some comments
by geertjan on Tue 20th Dec 2011 09:55 in reply to "Some comments"
geertjan Member since:
2010-10-29

This is what I would've posted if I wasn't lazy ;)

Sounds like most of your problems are with either Samsung's changes to Android, or are things that are fixed in ICS, Thom.

I'm a very happy Nexus S with ICS user. I think the SGS2 can be even better than my Nexus S if only Samsung would do an update to vanilla ICS.

Reply Parent Score: 1