geoken

But the lag most complain about isn’t even in the home screen. It’s within the lists in various apps (both first and third party).

I’ve used CM9 on my Galaxy Nexus. If you believe that there’s no lag then you likely haven’t used the phone alongside an iOS or WP7 device. I had a lowly Lumia 710 at the same time as the Galaxy Nexus, and the Lumia never lagged. The Galaxy Nexus would frequently have keyboard lag, the play store always lagged when you flicked through a list, the Gmail app always stutters when flicking through the emails, the calendar (in agenda view) would lag hard when trying to flick it quickly. I’m not even going to bother getting into third party apps because I’m sure that argument will be dismissed as being the fault of the developer (ignoring the fact that these devs put even less time into their WP7 apps and are able to produce buttery smooth UI).

Owned a GNex, it still lagged more than WP7 and iOS. I actually never owned a non-nexus device. My Android phones were; G1, Magic, Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus (I know the G1 and Magic weren’t technically Nexus devices, but they existed before any Android skins. They both ran vanilla android.). If non Nexus phones are even laggier than that’s ridiculous.

I don’t own an iPhone. My current device is actually an N9 but I’m probably going to be swapping it for an HTC Radar soon. It might come as a surprise to you, but everyone who likes something you do not is not automatically a brain dead zombie.

On My Galaxy Nexus;
-Agenda view in the calendar stutters horribly when flicked
-Play Store stutters when flicking through lists of apps
-Gmail app stutters when flicking through main inbox view
-News & Weather stutters with swiping through news categories
-Gallery stutters when scrolling through albums (surprising because the Gingerbread gallery was actually smooth)

Aside from stuttering in apps, the keyboard itself lagged really bad. I could easily get one or two characters ahead of the graphic that indicates a key press as well as the actual character displayed in the text entry. Also, I only mentioned 1st party apps to avoid the typical response of blaming a dev for not knowing how to code properly.

Can you elaborate on that? I’m not understanding how iOS is “freezing every UI element on screen”. In fact, iOS’s touch response seems noticably faster than any Android phone I’ve owned.

I’m convinced the issue here is that people have different definitions of ‘lag’. I’m with you, I’ve never used an Android phone that I didn’t find laggy. I remember when the SGSII came out and everyone was like “those phones you used before sucked. Use an SGSII and you’ll see there is no lag”. The first time I got a chance to use one I immideatly went to the settings menu and flicked it hard, the thing was animating at 10fps or lower. I started playing around with other things on the OS and the results were no better, sure the browser was smoother but only when compared to lesser android devices, when compared to the smoothness of iOS or WP7 it was still lacking. I think at thise point I resolved that people are actually unable to notice the lag, which I thought was weird but was the only way I could explain the fact that people were calling this phone lag free.

The exact same thing happened when I picked up a Galaxy Nexus. It was supposedly lag free but the thing didn’t hold a candle to my previous Samsung Focus.

I owned a Galaxy Nexus. Twice. I will gaurantee you I can make it’s keyboard lag with almost no effort. On WP7, I can’t make the keyboard fall behind me no matter how hard I try. Have you ever used an ICS phone??

I’m not just talking about the home screen. Go into play, go into agenda view on the calendar, even the new gmail app all stutter when you flick them quickly (the agenda view on the calendar is especially bad, on my GNex there were times were it would literally freeze for half a second then progress at an extremely low frameate).

Is it really a trade off? Because as far as I can tell iPhone’s have always had some of the best battery life of all available phones.

The only tricks iOS and WP7 use are processing touch interactions and animations in different threads and not allowing UI drawing to ever impact these.

Android’s choppiness is baked right into the core of the OS. I feel like OEMs actually like it because they know Android power users will flock to the newest, unnecessarily overpowered hardware in the hopes that it will be able to reproduce the smoothness of iOS/WP7.

I think he’s asking people to define why it’s a decent product (above Komodo Edit which itself is a great text editor). Obviously if you make a living at it the price is chump change, but if there are no appreciable benefits then it still isn’t worth it.

Yeah, I think it’s pretty realistic to expect Microsoft to release the final icons after the all the betas. When they moved from the XP to Vista style icons, the new icon set wasn’t revealed until right before the OS was released. There was no pre-release version (including the release candidates) that included the final icons.

I couldn’t look away in time. In that brief moment I aged 17 years.

I would disagree with your point but we all know any argument is automatically right when it’s stated in the form of a mock motivational poster.

I doubt they’ll stay. If you look at the select buttons in the last pane they have a different aesthetic than the rest. Those are newly designed buttons (the current ones in wordpad look different). I’d guess the entries icon set will move in a similar direction.

It’s crazy. I see people using right click > paste and I think to myself “how can you do that over and over again when CTRL+V is 1000x faster”, then I realize those people are the ‘advanced’ users and the average users still use file menus for pasting.

MS always does (or at least shows) the icons last. When Vista was coming out, the refreshed icons were one of the last UI aspects that were revealed. If I remember correctly, even the RC didn’t contain the final icon set.

The issue is not building/sourcing a screen of that size and resolution. The issue is that simply changing screen resolution is more difficult in iOS. Look at how the iPad handles running iPhone apps vs how Android tablets handle running phone apps.

The ‘gigantic’ bezel is a usability feature. I quickly realized this after owning an HD7. The HD7 had a bezel so thin that you were unable to firmly place your thumb on it without having some portion of your thumb contacting the screen (the bottom bezel was bigger, but it had the capacitive buttons so you also could hold the phone from there). With previous phones I had a grip style where I could hold the phone in landscape mode with one hand, this required placing my index finger against the front of the device (usually against its bezel). With the HD7 this was impossible because there wasn’t enough surface area anywhere on the front bezel to do this.

WP7 seems to me the only OS that has actually made an attempt to localize items towards the bottom of the screen. Suggesting that Android does this is completely incorrect. Besides the notification area and the app launcher (which you for some reason believe are ‘rarely accessed’) there are things like;

-Gmail, the send button is still on the top of the email composition window
-Browser, all controls are still on the top of the window
-Calendar, all view change controls are on the top of the window

That is just a list of first party apps which I use the most. I’m sure others could give you similar lists based on the apps they most frequent.

The back button in the top left corner may be standard in most iOS apps, but the ‘tab bar’ along the top of most Android apps is also pretty standard.

I don’t understand what the issue is? Nokia is the only one in the WP7 game putting money into marketing. MS didn’t announce these apps on WP7, Nokia announced them because they are to the ones fronting cash to get these exclusives. Why would Nokia pay for a year of exclusivity with ESPN then let Microsoft make a general announcement?

Fragmentation (at least in the sense of Android) is when the core OS is so different, either because there are multiple versions of the OS in general use or because OEM has fundamentally changed underlying aspects of the OS, that app makers have difficulty targeting the entire ecosystem. Offering exclusive apps is a totally different issue (I would argue not an issue at all).

It’s bad enough that I decided to use the stock Maps app instead. That’s something I never did on my Lumia 710 (I’m now using a Radar)

This is a good strategy. Adding annoying, un skip-able time wasters to the beginning of a DVD makes it far less likely that people will simply torrent the file. Making their products more difficult to use will definitely get people to stop downloading pirated version.

I owned one for a few days.

The OS is conceptually amazing.

Some things I liked about it;

The always on screen works great, from what I could tell it isn’t actually always on. It seems like it uses the proximity sensor so if the phone is face down or in your pocket the screen won’t be on. Either way, it’s really effective. You wouldn’t think that saving you a single press of a hardware button would really be a notable feature but for me it was. The reason was because you usually don’t pull your phone out of your pocket in a manner where your hand is already in its regular grip, so typically you pull the phone out then need to adjust it in your hand so your finger is properly positioned to hit the power button. You don’t realize how cumbersome this is for doing something as simple as checking the time or notifications until you use the N9. With the N9, you just grab the phone from your pocket with your thumb and index finger, pull it halfway out of your pocket, glance down and glean the needed info, then slide it back into your pocket. You quickly realize the reason it’s efficient is not because it saves you from pressing a button, it’s because it saves you from needing to reposition your hand in a manner necessary to press said button.*
*I should point out that I’m now using an HTC phone that is afflicted by HTC’s stubborn insistence on putting the lock/unlock button on the top of the phone making it extremely difficult to press if your hand is in anything but the optimal grip (and even then it’s not easy). In other words, the importance I place on the always-on screen may be skewed by the fact that I’m currently using a phone with a very difficult to activate screen.

The swipe based UI is also great. It again allows you to use the phone in a way that you aren’t constantly shifting your grip. With typical smart phone OSes I need to reposition my grip to hit home button. Being able to swipe from anywhere means I can access the home screen, notification screen and multitasking screen without ever having to reposition my grip. The same can’t be said about Android based phones where anything above 4 inches makes it difficult for me to position my hand in a way that I can hit both the home/multitasking buttons and the notification shade. The only thing I would want to make it better is to have a method for jumping straight to the screen you want, ie. left to right swipe takes you to notifications regardless of the fact that you were just on the home screen. There’s actually an app that does this but it doesn’t work as expected, during the swipe it still shows you the last screen that you were on, then once the swipe completes it jumps to the specific screen based your swipe direction. This defeats the purpose for me because the lure of this feature would be the ability to glance at your notification screen without needed to dismiss the app you’re in (ie. 80% to get a good view of the notification screen, then reverse the swipe if there is nothing of Importance and just continue using the app you were in).

The hardware, with the exception of the hardware buttons (more on that later), was great. There’s not really much to say here because N9/Lumia 800/Lumia 900 hardware has been praised ad nauseam.

The keyboard is good. I would place it just below WP7. In smoothness and responsiveness it is virtually on par with WP7. The only place it falls short is on the autocorrect suggestions. They aren’t as accurate as WP7. Also, it isn’t good with punctuation so it won’t do what most other platforms do where they allow you to forgo certain punctuation.

Some things I didn’t like (aka why I sold it);

The hardware buttons (volume keys and screen lock) were extremely loose. This point may seem minor except for the fact that most people looking at an N9 are doing so in large part because of the hardware. You’re making concessions to own this rare beast, so when it doesn’t live up to one of its claims to fame (the fantastic hardware/build quality) it’s a huge letdown. I did a bit of research to see if my issue was isolated but the consensus on talk.maemo seemed to be that all current units (going back a couple of months suffer from this) while units older than ~3 months are fine. The problem also seemed to be with both Finnish and Chinese made devices, people who had taken the extra effort (and cost) to acquire a Finnish made unit had the same issue. I know I’m OCD about stuff like that though, so for some this might be a complete non-issue.

The browser, while webkit based, seemed to have issues with many sites that work fine on Android and even WP7. My bank’s site was one such example. I don’t know who’s to blame here, but either way it’s disheartening because the lack of apps means you will necessarily be relying on web sites and web apps. Another site that had quirks was the mobile version of reddit, some kind of flaw made it almost impossible to hit the comment button. It was as if the hit area for the comment button was only 1×1px. Again, I could live with this if there were reddit apps, but there aren’t really any usable ones. A quirky browser isn’t really liveable when the lack of apps will force you to use that browser to use various web apps.

App localization is also an issue. I was fully prepared for a dearth of apps, but even apps that you expect to find in the small app store are typically not geared for North America since the phone was never officially sold here. For example, when looking for a movie listings/showtimes app I found many for various regions in Asia but nothing for North America. In other words, even if you think to yourself “They may have very few apps, but I’m sure they’ll at least have ______”, you may be right but it may likely not be usefull in North America.

The sync software didn’t work properly. In order to have podcasts on my device and have them show up in the music player I had planned on downloading the podcasts in iTunes, then creating smart playlists to house these podcasts. I would then use the most recent version of Nokia Link to sync those podcasts/smart playlists. Unfortunately, the latest version of Nokia Link didn’t work with recent versions of iTunes. Would Nokia fix this, who knows? If it breaks again with a future iTunes update will Nokia fix it at that point? Again unknown seeing as how this piece of software is exclusive to the N9, an EOL’d device. What I can say is that the version of Nokia Link that wasn’t working was already several months old.

The OS has random slowdowns/freezes. The annoyance of these is compounded by the fact that there is no immediate indicator that the OS has registered your touch. When it’s running properly, it’s about as smooth as WP7. I wouldn’t call it laggy in the way that Android is laggy. In Android there are areas that you can reproduce laggy scrolling 100% of the time. The N9 wasn’t like that. Even when it lagged, it was more like a hiccup where it would completely freeze for a split second, then resume at a buttery smooth framerate. There weren’t really any situations that I could continuously achieve laggy scrolling (like I can in the Play app or Gmail or the Agenda view of the calendar on a Galaxy Nexus/ICS). If you’ve ever experienced lag on an iOS device, this is what the N9 is like. You’ll get a brief period of really heavy stuttering followed by the resumption of silky smooth framerates.

Why would you need that? Can’t voice control do that stuff? Seems to me it would be way better to just have a really big blue tooth button that you could easily hit without looking, then say “navigate to ____” or “call _ cell”.

I feel like car stereo makers are having a tough time resigning themselves to being ‘dumb pipes’. I was looking for a system the other day in lieu of buying a bluetooth speaker for making phone calls while driving. I was surprised by how many of them wanted to download my contacts off of my phone and use their own voice recognition software to allow me to place voice calls. It’s funny because I’m now leaning to one of the cheaper systems which lacks this “feature” and instead just acts like a typical Bluetooth headset and initiates my phones built in voice command system.

It seems like Microsoft is trying to carve out a niche by selling mid-low end smart phones and leveraging the fact that their OS still runs great on these devices.