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Comment by jannes | Hacker News Reader

  Beginning with Android 4.0, hardware acceleration for all
  windows is enabled by default if your application has set
  either targetSdkVersion or minSdkVersion to “14" or higher.
  Hardware acceleration generally results in smoother
  animations, smoother scrolling, and overall better
  performance and response to user interaction.

This is great news for users like me who couldn't stand Android's low-framerate animations. But what's sad is that it took them so long.

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The choppiness in the UI is awful, but it's not solely the result of a lack of hardware acceleration (though it's no doubt a contributing factor).

Google have said [1] that it's primarily the result of lots of GC rather than drawing performance.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=6914

And they have somewhat mitigated that as of Gingerbread with the new concurrent GC.

A number of my friends point to Android's laggy scrolling as the reason they wouldn't consider it over an iPhone. It'll be interesting to see if the hardware acceleration fixes this defect.

I've never noticed laggy scrolling and I don't even have a current gen phone (Droid X). Perhaps your friends have other reasons for not considering it...

Edit: Maybe because I've always used launcher pro?

Even with Launcher Pro, other parts of the OS can be laggy. (Though Launcher Pro is amazing.) But I thing the more accurate term would be choppy. You don't notice it that much until you use another platform for a small amount of time. Then going back it is very noticable.

Gingerbread fixes some of the "lag" issues with the partly GPU accelerated UI, mostly noticeable in the notifications pull-down menu.

Opera Mobile (GPU accelerated), with a decent launcher, memory optimizations (V6 Supercharger, or a good Autokiller config), and Android will perform just as good as any other mobile OS. Unfortunately to get great performance Android needs to be rooted.

That is it. I find my android phone animation perfectly acceptable until I tried an iPhone. Even a Windows Phone 7 feels better. I really hope android 4 address this problem.

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