I like your solution too - it 'gets you to the goods' much faster :) At the moment I feel like mine sort of overpromises and underdelivers, e.g. the style and features functionality doesn't work particularly well yet.

About the pre-loading, I'm actually already doing that... But only the next one in the queue. How many were you trying to load at once? I did notice that even only pre loading one is enough to slow it down considerably on my nexus 4 though...