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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."
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
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.