My Touchpad (AKA “The Mobile Platform Test Device”) has had both its OSes updated in the last couple days. WebOS bumped from 3.0.4 to 3.0.5, and I updated the Android install from Cyanogenmod 7 Alpha 3.5 (Gingerbread based) to Cyanogenmod9 Alpha0 (Ice Cream Sandwich based).
tl;dr version: Cyanogenmod9 is, by virtue of speed and features, at rough pairty with WebOS, even though its interactions are uniformly worse.
Details below.
The WebOS upgrade is a mostly inconcequentaial incrimental improvement – the only signifigant change I noticed is that the integration and utility of the external Bluetooth keyboard is dramatically improved. Most signifigantly, the customary cut/copy/paste Ctrl+c/x/v shortcuts have been implimented… which is fucking fabulous. It would be better if I could have a ctrl key on the soft keyboard to use there too, but I’ve wanted that back since my n810 died. They also fixed card switching with the keyboard, and made some other minor improvements. There is also a slight temporary disadvantage in that the patch for arrow keys on the otherwise excellent soft keyboard wasn’t immediately updated, and life is much, much better with proper cursor manipulation.
The Android update however, is huge. Massive changes, mostly for the better. Huge props to the CyanogenMod Touchpad folks for getting things basically working, and subsiquently releasing both full source and a user-friendly build promptly. There are a handful of things missing from the CM9A0 build (such as the camera and microphone), which impact several of the more prominent ICS features, and a wee bit of instability (I’ve caused one spontaneous reboot grade crash and a couple FCs) but it is still an overall good experence.
The specific thoughs below are the result of a somewhat awkward multi-way comparison – They are mostly the result of judging CM9 on the Touchpad against CM7 on the same hardware, but I am also comparing againts WebOS and my Sense-contaminated Gingerbread phone.
CM9 Thoughts:
- Android is still enormously faster at most display operations than WebOS (which is apparently fundamental).
- Notification area is FIXED. Descriptive pop-ins! Individual Message Dismissial! Best of all the mobile platforms I’ve tried.
- The Three Vertical Dots Menu/Settings button that is standard in many of Google’s apps is a step down from having a dedicated menu button in the requriements. Hints of iOS style “Find the settings panel, if there is one” disfunction. It could and should have been kept in the soft button area for all applications, like happens for those that expect a menu button.
- The “Recent Applications” softbutton improves the multitasking/task switching experence. It is still bad, but considerably less terrible.
- The soft buttons, remarkably, are not bad. I would still rather have hardware, but the consistency and feedback make them remarkably more tolerable than under Gingerbread.
- TABS IN THE DEFAULT BROWSER! EEEEE! They could stand to be smaller and/or autohide, but it makes the browser roughly 10x more usable than the awkward zoom/multiwindow thing that existed before.
- This isn’t really a Gingerbread/ICS difference, but Google Reader works on the Touchpad now, which makes it rather incredibly more useful. Now if Google would fix sharing content from mobile devices it would be a whole lot more useful.
- Google needs to port the swipe-navigation GMail client back to Gingerbread like they have done with the other recent gapps – having swipe reader and button GMail on my phone is driving me batty, and the addition of swipe versions of both on the Touchpad is exascerbating the problem.
- The default Android software keyboard is still crap.
- Generally, Android has problems with spacial representations. The developers clearly KNOW spacial representations are important, with the homescreen layouts and such, but it gets them wrong in all kinds of ways. Applications don’t geometrically relate to each other. (on my sense phone) The homescreen’s adjacency isn’t consistent (row when scrolling, cross-shaped 5-up tile when zoomed) – it even tries to visually scoot them from linear when zooming to hint at the wierd thing it is doing. Consistent spatial metaphors are a good thing.
As much as things seem to be improving, I still don’t get the tablet craze. With very few exceptions, I’d rather sit with my laptop propped up in front of me and my hand resting on keyboard shortcuts, or hold my phone in one hand and flick through content with my thumb than cradle an awkwardly sized slab and waggle my arms at it.
