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Android User Spends 60 Days In WebOS Land
An anonymous reader writes "About six months ago, however, I began to wonder about how the other mobile products had grown. When the HTC HD7 crossed my path a little while ago, I decided to abandon my Nexus S and live among the Windows Phone folks for awhile. The experience was fun, but I eventually went back to my Nexus S. About a month later, I was presented with the opportunity to repeat the experiment, only this time with a Palm Pre Plus. With the HP Touchpad on its way, I wanted to get a feel for how WebOS worked, explore the differences, and take a look into the community that was still loyal to WebOS."
They go spend time with new things, bear with teething troubles and root out bugs so that normal consumers like me don't have to a couple of years down the line. Go Russel Holly!
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
More than how the OS works, I think a more important question is the availability of apps for the platform. There are many people whose worlds lie outside apps provided for Flixster, Facebook and Twitter. Are there any apps any webOS users found no substitute for, when they shifted from Android? Or other way round? Note: I bumped across this on doing a simple Google search: http://www.hpwebos.com/us/products/software/mobile-applications.html A lot like a market/app store for webOS.
1. Konami code activates developer mode (i.e., root or jailbroken). No muss, no fuss.
2. The "card" metaphor to represent running apps. Slide to switch, throw away to kill.
3. It's Linux, and mostly open source. (Shares that with Android.)
3b. Not M$, not Apple, for people that care (shares that with Android).
4. Apps are in HTML/Javascript. Easy. Or C++ (harder but faster to run)
5. Touch to move stuff between Pre and TouchPad.
6. Looks nice. Fonts, layout, icons, etc.
7. The homebrew community
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
The main problem with WebOS is the same main problem with iOS... it only runs on one platform. As such, it is doomed to failure. Android has become the Windows of the smartphone world. The hardware platform manufacturer is now nothing but a commodity.
I always laugh at iOS people who talk about a "unified UI".
Tell me, how do you return to the previous screen, in an iOS application? You can't, because ever app does it differently. In Android, you *always* hit the back button.
How do you bring up preferences for every iOS application? Again, they all do it differently. In Android, it is *always* the menu button.
In fact, pretty much every single iOS application does everything differently - they throw buttons and menus all over the place. Sometimes it is top left, sometimes top right, sometimes it is press and hold... it's nearly random. And there is seldom any visual cues to figure it out either, it is pretty much random guesswork.
Android is far, far more consistent than iOS.
Speaking as a former Mac developer and someone currently having to work with Android network stacks, WebOS seems to have thought more about human factors in a coherent way than either iOS or Android.
One word: Notifications. The notifications system in WebOS is the epitome of "considerate." Whether it's of users' time or attention or screen real estate, they have created a UI that very capably tells the user when something important happens, and gets out of the way while discreetly leaving a telltale that there's something to acknowledge. The notifications systems on both iOS and Android are clunky by comparison.
Apple traditionally spends a lot of time thinking about human factors, but compared to their almost religious fervor for human interface guideline compliance in the pre-OSX era, these days they're on a fast track to MS Windows-level UI inconsistency. Well, perhaps not quite that fragmented, but it is what it is.
Android vendors have approached this by grafting on their own proprietary chrome, but some of those are better than others.
I invite anyone who really cares about intuitive usability to try out WebOS. Even on a first generation Palm Pre, it's noteworthy.
From a hacking and customization perspective, I have yet to see a system as friendly as WebOS. Palm and HP have taken their sweet time with some of the SDK/PDK releases, but they've also done things to make it about as easy for developers as one can imagine. Having a full IDE running in a web browser is both a neat hack and rather convenient. Pretty much everything other than time-critical code is in Javascript.
That openness does not come without some potential downsides. While I love that I can customize my phone by tweaking a line of Javascript, I can't help but feel a nagging concern that there are security implications inherent in some of the choices Palm/HP made. It remains to be seen how pervasive those might be, but I'm remaining wary. It won't stop me from using the handset (yet), as I have yet to find anything else as friendly, open, and customizable.
While I completely agree with you, I think you took it a little too far. The GP obviously was talking about look and not function. Obviously no one cares about consistent and uniform function as long as it looks pretty.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
OS/2 is still in use today among many many companies.
I write bullshit
I've got an adroid phone and would love an answer to this: You've navigated to a screen deep within an application. You then hit the home button to go do something else. Then you go back into the application in question... Now when you hit the back button, what happens? The 'last' thing you were at was the home screen, so I've seen some apps simply close and drop you at the home screen. Other apps know your previous history and send you 'back' as if you had never navigated away. There have been several times when I've found myself stuck in a certain part of an app and can't get back to the main screen because the back button closes the app.
We always knew Comcast was corrupt, here's the proof: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909890&cid=34545432
Obviously you failed to understand "Think Different".
There simply isn't a unified Android UI and it would annoy me to have to choose which hardware I bought based on the UI it would run. I might want a Samsung phone but with the Sense UI.
That attitude pretty sad, isn't it? You don't want to use Android because you're incapable of making choices?
Freedom of choice makes Android a much better environment than Apple's mobile products. Take dual-core phones for example: HTC Sensation, Motorola Atrix, LG Optimus 2X, Samsung Galaxy S2... I think I've missed many others too. How many dual-core options does Apple have again? What if you want a physical keyboard? Different screen size or display technology?
If you just want Apple to make all your choices for you, then it's pretty plain to see that your options are far more limited. No matter what the software is running on top, you'll get used to it before long - it's not like you have to learn a new programming language or anything. It sounds more like you're just looking for reasons (ignorant, trivial, desperate reasons) to cast the entire OS aside rather than actually trying it.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
Sounds pretty much like a horror story to me.
Why anyone would choose anything over Android at this point is well beyond my understanding. The code is easy to write (Java/XML or Native C-based) runs excellently on even old hardware, as long as it's not Crysis, and the developer community is the size of the friggin' moon. It's been around for a good while, so people have gotten most of the bugs out of the base programming. The app store doesn't require approval/scrutiny to upload your programs, and the developer resources headed up by Google are amazing. The entire system is open source as well, so developers are able to 'compile their own' version of the OS to suit their devices and needs.
Until I see that on these other systems, I'm at a loss for why anyone but Mac Cult members would use anything non-android.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
"Polished" doesn't equal "shiny." Actually, it means "someone put thought into the design." Sadly, this is not true for a lot of desktop Linux implementations. In a lot of ways, using the latest GNOME feels like going back in time to Windows 3.1. Instead of acknowledging this, you're advising people not to use Linux. Probably good advice.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
You use any bluetooth keyboard on the planet, with phone or iPad.
It's not a solution. A phone with an integrated physical keyboard is a vastly better experience than having a keyboard that you have to lug separately from your phone.
since the ultimate point of any device is to run software you can make use of - and there the iPhones/iPads truly offer "far more" choice.
That's arguable. Sure, iOS app store has more apps, but on both iOS and Android, vast majority of apps in the store are useless crap.
Focusing on those which are not, it depends on what your needs are. If you already use Google services (GMail/Talk/Voice/...) a lot, then Android offers a far better experience, since it has native full-featured clients for all of those. Ditto for Apple services, though they have fewer adherents outside of iTMS.
If you want Skype, it's a bit of a draw - on iPhone you have the best version to date, complete with video chat; but there is no iPad support, so you have to run the phone version. On Android you have proper version for both phones and tablets, but video chat is only available on selected phone models.
If you want games, then iOS generally has more of them, and they are higher quality, but some gems - like Majesty - are only available on Android so far. Also, Android has DOSBox, and I was surprised just how much I enjoyed the old point-and-click quests (like "Legend of Kyrandia") on my Android tablet.
For productivity apps it's a draw. For all the hype about Pages/Numbers, they are pretty limited feature-wise in practice. Third-party Office packages exist for both platforms, and usually have the same features and limitations (in many cases, it's the same apps). Android gets a bonus in having a dedicated Exchange client (TouchDown) which doesn't pollute your phone's contact list and mailbox, and can be PIN-locked and remote wiped in isolation from the rest of your data. Android gets a further bonus for having MS Office Communicator / Lync client. iOS gets a huge bonus for OS-wide support of HTTP proxies, which Android has only got in 3.1 (what the fuck, Google?).
For web browsing, Android is way ahead. Even if we just look at the stock browser, mobile Safari is fairly inconvenient - most annoying is that it doesn't have an option to open tabs in background, so every time I want to open a link "for later", I have to open in new tab, and then switch to the original tab. It also decides to reload page opened in a tab if you left it it in background for "too long" (which can be just a few minutes in practice). This is exceedingly annoying when you were writing a comment on some forum, opened a new tab to do the needed research, and then switch back just to see your comment form reloaded, and everything you've typed in it gone. That Apple could make such a horrible UX is unbelievable. Then, of course, there's no ad blocking. And minor stuff like not being able to open more than 9 tabs. And third-party browsers? They exist, and they solve all of these problems, but there's no way to set them as default in iOS; so any link you open in any other app will still open in Safari. Grrr!
In contrast, in Android you have a pretty decent stock browser which doesn't have any of the stupidities described above. You have a bunch of third-party browsers built on the same WebKit engine but with variously different UIs. Then you have browsers using their own engines - namely Firefox (extensions! AdBlock!), and Opera (holy shit this thing is fast... as smooth as Safari, but you never see the checkerboard!). And what's most important is that you can make any of those browsers system default, so it will handle all HTTP links.
Oh yes, there's Flash. This one is so-so - it's still sluggish on Android, and has some annoyances of its own, such as intercepting scroll gestures if they fall onto the plugin. On the other hand, it's still useful to have occasionally when you need to view a Flash-based webs