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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

I went Android because there's no need to jailbreak the phone to install third-party, and I'm a programmer. I don't have to pay $99/yr to program for it, or own a computer that runs one particular operating system.

I'll admit that for a long time, the iPhone experience was way better than Android. And the browser and media functionality are still horrible. And the games... -sigh-

But in general, I love the Android experience. On the newer phones (much newer than Nexus S) the lag is gone. The only lag left is the same as the iPhone: Launching apps. Apps generally behave in ways that I like. (Notifications, interoperability, etc.)

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See, I far prefer the browser on Android because of one thing - the single most important thing in a phone browser, IMO - text reflow on zoom.

That surprises me. I find the Android browser to be completely unusable, primarily due to performance but secondarily due to that annoying text reflow.

What bad performance? IME, my Nexus One browser is slightly less smooth to scroll, but faster at redraw than the browsers on my (admittedly, slightly old at this point) iOS devices. It's a toss-up, really.

Question: do you have Flash installed? I had to uninstall it completely, because even the "on demand" option for browser plugins didn't disable it reliably.

(Biggest problem I have with my iOS devices (an iPod Touch and 1st gen iPad) is that they run out of charge on standby, from lack of use...)

> What bad performance?

Did you miss the video in the article? - The one where the iPhone scrolls as smooth as butter, and the other phone scrolls slow enough to make me wonder - is it frozen?

FWIW this has been my experience with Android as well. Obviously not every web page is like this, but even if 5% of the pages out there do this - it's a serious usability problem.

I just don't understand how the scrolling performance on android is still so inferior to that on iOS, especially when comparing devices where the droid has significantly higher hardware specs

Of course I didn't miss the video; but my experience has never been like that, except maybe when I briefly had Flash installed, for a few hours a year or so ago. I addressed it in the following comment, and a different comparison video too, for bonus points!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3121906

I don't like the phone browser. It's particularly annoying to read news with, because any site with Disqus (IIRC) causes the address bar to flash every time it receives another packet. I've gotten into the habit of hitting the stop button as soon as the text displays in order to kill whatever else is running. I could just turn off javascript, but then *.google.com doesn't work nearly as well.

The browser in Honeycomb is a lot friendlier and resembles Chrome, and word is that come Wednesday, the browser in Android 4.0 will be Chrome - what this means in practice I'm not sure, but so far my upgrade experiences have been positive.

The game situation on Android isn't too bad actually, it was a year ago, but now most of the popular iOS games (or clones that are very close approximations :)) are available with a few exceptions, as well as a couple of high quality Android exclusives. iOS still has way more variety and I don't see that changing anytime soon though.

man trust me...the art of jailbreaking and playing with Saurik's mobile substrate to plug in code into apps is some serious fun!

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