Comment by babebridou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by babebridou | Hacker News Reader

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I've had the chance to enjoy dual-core android phones (Atrix, 2.2) & tablets (Xoom, 3.1). The difference compared to single-cores is gigantic, everything is super smooth, on the level of the iPhone/iPad as far as responsiveness goes for apps and home screen. I have to say that if the goal is to have a superb OS given a powerful enough phone, the goal has been met, with one (critical!) exception:

Android's Webview unfortunately requires a rewrite from scratch. It just doesn't work as soon as the webview is more than a static page. Css Animations don't play anywhere near fast enough, there are furious hardware acceleration glitches whenever the touch keyboard pops up, touch events are slow as hell, etc.

The article only touches the surface of the problems with the Webview component. At this point we don't care about scrolling. since one pretty much has to hack a custom Webview component just to avoid all the hardware glitches, display artifacts, buggy input handling, terrifying variations of performance from device to device...

> OS given a powerful enough phone, the goal has been met, with one (critical!) exception

Two exceptions: Audio latency. It is impossible to write certain classes of table applications for Android right now, because no priority was given to having a low-latency audio subsystem. Its at least as big a mess as display acceleration.

You're 100% right. For more information on this issue: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3434

Any Android users out there that want to see Android succeed should star the issue linked in the parent comment. There are a significant number of excellent music/audio apps for musicians and tinkerers for iOS that are not possible on Android because of the above issue. For example, search YouTube for "EveryDay Looper".

I have also played with and had dual core android phones and the scrolling experience is nothing like iOS by any means. One of Steve Jobs skills is that he had an innate feel for good scrolling well beyond the feel of the average person. It might feel the same to you. You might be perfectly happy with an android. Still, android has a challenge to make the OS feel as snappy on a wider range of CPUs and platforms than iOS and the lack of of consistency, even on dual core machines is like night and day.

I own a Toshiba Thrive for various reasons... and it's UI is a laggy steamy POS. Maybe it's manufacturer specific.

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