How Google Can Make Android Truly Tablet-Worthy

With an Android armada on the horizon (or at least expected), reader androidtablet plugs this piece on ways Android could be truly tablet-friendly. Armchair engineering may be easy to knock, but I like the ideas presented here, such as aggressively using the inactive (locked) screen state to display useful information.

Comments

Wrong

[0xdeadbeef]

Mandatory hardware buttons, and dictate their placement. Having the back button, menu button, and home button change places on different Android devices is retarded. And make it hard to accidentally hit them. Apple's "fuck whatever you're doing and quit" key is stupidest UI decision ever made. Putting it where you hold the device makes it even worse.

Want to be real awesome? Have touch-sensitive dedicated scroll areas off the display surface.

Support pen input, from low-end pressure screens to that fancy induction Wacom stuff. That is the real future of tablets, always has been, always will be. There is a reason only children fingerpaint.

Re:Wrong

[shikaisi]

I don't think David Hockney would be classed as a child, and he seems pretty enthusiastic about the iPad as a (finger)painting medium.

Status information!

[teh dave]

aggressively using the inactive (locked) screen state to display useful information

I don't know exactly what that means but I like the sound of it. Mobile operating systems, especially ones from Apple, should be a lot better than they are at at displaying device and communications status. It's one of the... maybe two things Windows Mobile is good at: at a glance I can see how many emails I have in each individual account, how many appointments I have today and the two or three coming up, how many active tasks I have and the first few highest priority/earliest due, how much data I've used this month, what the weather will be like tomorrow, and of course the time, date, battery and signal et cetera. All from one button press. And of course there are lots of other Today plugins available and they are easy to develop.

If you cringe at that, that's fine. You don't like it and most people I know don't want "clutter" on their home screen either. That's fine for them but iPhone OS doesn't give the choice to those of us who would like to use an otherwise purposeless blank screen for displaying useful information. The key word there is choice... you can have it your way and I can have it my way. At least, we could, if iPhone supported a single bit of customisation...

Re:What about actually making it work right???

[Zixaphir]

I don't know, man. All the features I could ever want work great outta the box. As long as I'm locked into Android, there is no way I'll ever lose my contacts. When I format or switch to a new phone, my apps are all downloaded again automagically. If I don't like something about the OS, I can generally replace it with some third party application. When android tablets start coming out, if I get one, my custom "Android" will likely follow me onto it. I don't know, as someone who had to deal with people when they had synchronization problems with ActiveSync and their Windows Mobile phones (problems sync'ing generally mean loss of everything without some roundabout backup/restore of PIM), I can't get enough of Android's robust synchronization with "the cloud"