Harry Bizzle wrote:
Mogster wrote:
Harry Bizzle wrote:
Re: Honeycomb - what makes it so much better than everything else?
Nothing. Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) is the latest version of Android. Honeycomb was the first tablet optimised version, but didn't support phones. ICS supports both, and comes with a bunch of nifty improvements. Not least the widgets!
Yeah, sorry, I meant ICS. What's so great about it, that it's better than iOS, as mentioned in the Apple thread. Just widgets?
Oh I see. Well personally I think Android as an OS is a lot better than iOS to start with, in that it has a unified file system you can actually use, proper support for background processes, better notifications and so on.
ICS however is a significant improvement over Gingerbread too (I haven't used Honeycomb). I've never much liked the stock Android launcher in the past for instance, and third party replacements offered a lot of genuinely useful features it lacked. The ICS launcher is lovely though, and incorporates a lot of the good stuff as fundamental features of Android. Drag and drop folders (that one's a tie with iOS
), five spaces in the dock, notifications you can swipe away individually, a multitasking switcher with previews of each app's state (that you can also swipe away to close), and indeed the new widgets.
It finally adds support for scrollable widgets for one thing, which used to be restricted to third party launchers with their own specific widgets, which is why the universal widgets in the market always relied on button clicks at most. The best thing about them though is that ICS widgets are almost windowed apps in their own right. The Mail and Gmail ones for example allow you to scroll through your inbox (or other folder of your choice) and launch individual emails. Unfortunately most third party apps don't come with ICS widgets yet, but they're starting to appear. I use Flick Note for notes, which has a lovely widget not unlike the mail ones. They're nice enough on a phone, but I can imagine they'd be fantastic on a tablet. You'd be able to access lots of glanceable info from several apps on a single screen without having to switch between apps, or even launch an app.
On top of all that ICS is just really well designed and pleasant to use, and I always found Android a little sterile in the past. By default there's a really satisfying click when you tap on stuff for instance, and normally I find that sort of thing really annoying.
By contrast iOS is very limited. Some of this is by design, like the lack of an accessible file system, but in general it just does very little other than launch apps, and Apple seem to be content to shoehorn new features into it without adjusting what came before. The new notifications are a good example, as they actually obscure part of your open app when they appear, and you have to press a fiddly little button to dismiss them without actually launching the app. Outside of apps the OS doesn't really do anything, which is particularly silly on something as big as an iPad. It also heavily restricts what can be run in the background, which helps ensure a consistent experience but prevents apps from doing anything interesting when they're not taking up the screen space.
Don't get me wrong, iOS is fine, but ICS just does a lot more. This doesn't change the fact that Android is really lacking when it comes to tablet apps of course.
_________________
I play games and mumble over them:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Mogster2013
FAQ
Register
Login
