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Comment by mks | Hacker News Reader

We have got into minor issues with Honeycomb - the new selection/copy/paste in the text areas took our app by surprise. The other thing was TAB key events that don't get fired from the Honeycomb keyboard even if tab is inserted to the text correctly. However these are probably edge cases.

My biggest gripe is that Honeycomb emulator is dead slow, so testing anything on it without a real device is really painful.

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This is because the Android emulator is a real emulator emulating an ARM instruction set on your x86 box (it uses QEMU), whereas the iPhone Simulator is a proper port of CocoaTouch to Mac OS X.

I think both of them suck. The Android emulator is slow and the iPhone Simulator is inaccurate[1].

Here's an effort to port Android to x86: http://www.android-x86.org. I see a a 100% x86 Android emulator running on VMWare in the near future. Tasty :)

[1] For example, the iPhone Simulator lets you use NSFileManager to create files and directories inside your app bundle. This does not work on the actual device. I ran into this during a demo :|

Interesting, I'll keep that in mind if/when I get to deeper Honeycomb development.

As for the emulator, Android is notorious for it's terribly slow emulators. I've basically stopped using them and only use actual hardware to test on. The emulator is good for surfacing race conditions that only show up on super slow devices tough :-)

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