7 Hints About Upcoming Android 3.0 Gingerbread

[ari-free]

And they are working on it. But I know some of these engineers (all the way back from the BeOS days) and to say that they have "total disregard for human interface" is ridiculous.

 

[TDQuiksilver]

If the laggy/choppy aspect of Android is due to custom launchers, then why does Froyo run smoother than 2.1 (yet still not as fluid as iOS or even WebOS)?

Why does the Moto Droid, HTC EVO, and other Android devices lag? Are they all bad coders too?

Why does *the* Google phone, the Nexus One, lag?

As for Android being "new", that's no excuse to have weak performance. The original iPhone had silky smooth transitions and ran on a meager 620MHz processor underclocked to 412MHz. Every Android phone with a 1GHz chip should run like butter. Period.

Android is designed by a bunch of engineers with total disregard for UI and human factors. Even Google knows this and Gingerbread is supposed to address this very issue as stated in the interview posted by the OP.

You can't tell me that the out-of-the-box vanilla Android lags. That's simply crazy. Throw a manufacturer's customized "launcher" & bloatware on top of all the third party apps that you the user add... you're bound to run into some poor coding or total overload of system resources.

Is that simply an excuse? No, but it's hardly the fault of Google. They provided the tools for coders to build, but they don't choose how it is implemented or what the program can and cannot do. Again, having an "open" community allows any Joe Smith off the street to publish an application regardless if it has been through any sort of QA and/or proper testing.

Do you think every application for the iPhone is as smooth as butter? Doesn't kill the battery? Doesn't lag the UI? Other mobile UI's have every bit of the same problem when poor coding on third party software is introduced.

I'm not disagreeing that every now and again we catch a bit of "hang time" when our applications act funny or take an extra few seconds to respond. But overexaggerating on something that can alleviated with a few simple tweaks is nothing to write home about.

 

[Android_J]

You can't tell me that the out-of-the-box vanilla Android lags. That's simply crazy.

That's exactly what I'm telling you. If you think a Nexus One is just as fluid as an iPhone then I don't know what to tell you.

YouTube - Nexus One vs iPhone 4 input lag

And they are working on it. But I know some of these engineers (all the way back from the BeOS days) and to say that they have "total disregard for human interface" is ridiculous.

You might know them and think differently but all I have to judge Android on is what I see. Are you going to tell me that the UI is as good (in terms of fluidity and cohesion) as the iPhone's? I don't think it is. Matter of fact, I'd bet that the WP7 UI will be smoother and more cohesive than Android's. Details. It's lacking in Android. The feature set is good but it's very rough around the edges.

One other thing to note: a good UI is not designed by engineers. Human factors specialists and ID collaborate on human interfaces. Same reason why you will never see a (good) consumer product designed by an engineer. A car designed by an engineer would probably end up looking like a tank. Or a Pontiac Aztek.

 

[Bitbang3r]

I really believe that over-aggressive power management is responsible for a BIG part of lag, right alongside HTC's non-acceleration. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if the phone clocks down to ~200MHz and doesn't speed back up until it sees evidence of activity for a few hundred milliseconds... well, there's a big part of your lag right there.

The solution to lag, and battery life? 3500mAH batteries instead of the wimpy 1500mAH lame excuses for a sick joke all the current phones ship with. The Seidio extended-life battery I bought for my Hero was *absolutely* the best $65 or so I've ever spent on hardware. In exchange for about a third of a centimeter and another ounce or two of weight, I can leave my phone overclocked to 710MHz all the time with the brightness jacked up to 'max' and online more or less nonstop, and STILL have the phone make it through the whole day with enough battery life to work the next morning.

Why do they skimp on batteries? Who knows. Probably because it's one of the only things they can still cut corners on to meet a price point at the last moment after everything else has been cast in stone. Maybe because "fashion-conscious" consumers would rather have a thin, sexy phone that dies in the middle of the afternoon than one that still weighs less than the owner's penultimate phone did and can go for days on a single charge.

In any case, thank ${deity} for companies like Seidio, for giving us the batteries our phones really SHOULD have come with in the first place.

 

[mtb2k]

The user experience will by default ALWAYS be gimped until GPU acceleration is implemented. The thing I hear about most from the average user in comparing Android to iPhone is, 'but the iphone is so smooth when you do things'. This will always be true until Android takes advantage of all these powerful GPUs available now, some of which have surpassed the iPhone 4 GPU. Currently they are all going to waste for the most part. It's a shame to see such amazing hardware in a mobile device going to waste when you consider there aren't many demanding games available yet for Android in comparison. The user experience would be greatly improved and smoother in every day use of the phone.
Gingerbread has minimum requirements and Google has said they want to push newer devices and phase old hardware out, so there is no reason why 3.0 shouldn't be GPU accelerated.

 

[mtb2k]

You can't tell me that the out-of-the-box vanilla Android lags. That's simply crazy. Throw a manufacturer's customized "launcher" & bloatware on top of all the third party apps that you the user add... you're bound to run into some poor coding or total overload of system resources.

Vanilla Android on my Nexus One DOES lag, and that's because it isn't GPU accelerated like the iPhone. GPU acceleration would provide all that smoothness, and would also help with input lag. One thing I love about my ipod touch is that when I touch the screen to move something, it's a pretty instant thing. My N1 isn't quite like that.

GPU GPU GPU

 

[Niir]

hmm stock 2.2 running launcher pro on my desire is smooth as silk, possibly more smooth than the iphone 4s ive played with.

and its the same hardware essentially

 

[MrX8503]

Android is cool in that there are a lot of possibilities. But it severly lacks polish. Everything just feels like beta software, from the actual OS to apps. A phone should not be choppy and laggy on a 1GHz processor and I'm seeing just that on a recently released Samsung Captivate.

By the time Gingerbread comes out, Windows Phone 7 would have been released as well as the next version of iOS. Gingerbread will have to be top notch. This beta look and feel doesn't cut it now and will not cut it then.

Android isn't smooth because it doesn't incorporate GPU acceleration. Anand states this and for Android to be as smooth they need the GPU or a dualcore CPU.

Users who say that their android phone is smooth simply don't know what smooth is.

 

[fangorious]

Android_J: you need to separate the device from the software so you can place the blame where it deserves. The Nexus 1 has crap touchscreen hardware. The response time is slow is slow and it's very easy to confuse the hardware's multi-touch trackin. The Galaxy S has an amazing touchscreen and GPU acceleration of the UI (the iPhone has a lot of Samsung hardware in it, the same GPU as the Galaxy S line for starters) but Samsung (not Google/Android) made a horrible software design choice with a bad filesystem (I believe I've seen it described as journaled FAT32). The are multiple fixes from the community, hopefully either the GPS or the 2.2 update for the Galaxy S line will address that issue. There are other things they did that degrade the UI experience like the media scanning service. Apple gets a lot of crap for having one platform for both hardware and software, but this is where it pays off. Google doesn't want to design hardware (the Nexus 1 was a kick in the nuts to the underpowered devices that were being released at the time, now that good hardware is the standard the US Nexus is only for registered developers) and the device manufacturers want to customize the experience to differentiate their products (Sense, Blur, TouchWiz). The upcoming HTC Vision running vanilla Froyo with a Scorpion core CPU and the Adreno 205 GPU should provide all the seamless/fluid touchscreen performance we deserve. Personally I'm waiting for a good custom Galaxy S ROM. Because without Samsung's crap software slowing it down that hardware should scream the loudest.

 

[SupremeBeaver]

Like someone said previously.. GPU GPU GPU GPU!!!

Its all about the GPU. Oh and did i mention GPU?

If any of you using a Nexus One, Droid, Droid x, EVO , Dinc etc, think your phone is smooth, then ur on drugs.

CPUs arent optimized to accelerate an interface. In fact, when you scroll down your app list, your CPU is probably at 80% load trying to keep up (the poor thing). And undoubtedly it will start to chug.

Now when we get the GPU doing these tasks (swiping, scrolling, pinching) ala iPhone, then we have a winner. It is far more suited for doing these actions. The newer GPUs from today (adreno 200, 205, galaxy s gpu and droid x gpu) will hardly break a sweat doing these tasks. And actually now that i think about it, it might even save battery life a little.

I cant wait to see what Gingerbread has in store.

 

[Frisco]

Moved to the Updates area for you, Electro.

 

[AJ McKay]

If any of you using a Nexus One, Droid, Droid x, EVO , Dinc etc, think your phone is smooth, then ur on drugs.

You type "ur" and I'm supposed to take you seriously?

My Incredible is smooth. Smooth enough for me.

Ahem...I mean...

my inc iz smth srsly u gyz omg lol ttyl!

 

[BreatheElectro]

Yup my Nexus One is smooooooth as silk!! Damn those drugs must be kickin in!

 

[SupremeBeaver]

You type "ur" and I'm supposed to take you seriously?

My Incredible is smooth. Smooth enough for me.

Ahem...I mean...

my inc iz smth srsly u gyz omg lol ttyl!

You dismissed my whole argument because i typed "ur" rather then "you're"??

There's no running away from the fact.

As you say, the Dinc may be smooth enough for you, but that's not the point i was trying to make. Im saying how the GPU is far better optimized for certain tasks.

 

[Frisco]

my inc iz smth srsly u gyz omg lol ttyl!

lmgmo