ios

Wednesday, July 27 2011

One Hour with the WebOS TouchPad
[17:16:54] matt [wronka.org]/Psi.dementia The web browser has different trade-offs with the pre-IOS5 web kit browser. General display is better, but there are instances where the scrolling is broken until you zoom in or out first; support for Arabic is noticeably absent by default.

The device itself collects and displays fingerprints more-so than others I've used (Apple iPad, Nokia N900, Samsung/Google Nexus S).

Oddly, when I set the language to Spanish, it still showed the Google location services terms-of-service in English. Other license agreements were in Spanish.

It required me to create a "WebOS" account with my name and eMail address. It didn't require me to set the timezone, which it presumably got from my location.

My co-worker, and IOS advocate, voiced that there weren't enough apps in the store, and that the UI looked too much like KDE.

I might like it better than an IOS device--the fact that I can switch between the Web browser and other programs without closing each in turn is a large part of this--but I'm not sure that I would buy one on my own. It seems rough still, but still promising. If it hadn't been for the disruption of Palm going out of business and being acquired by HP, I would imagine that a lot of these rough edges would have been polished, and am dissapointed that this hypothetical device isn't what it is my hands.
[17:42:23] matt [wronka.org]/Psi.dementia The web browser keeps crashing as well. But so does MobileSfari on IOS.

Thursday, February 24 2011

[15:36:21] matt [wronka.org]/Merch So far Fennec 4 preview on the N900 is a win. CSS support seems superior to the stock weblit browsers on Android and IOS, it's responsive, and very usable. My only complaint is that--unlike in Opera--there isn't a virtual keyboard in portrait mode.

Wednesday, September 8 2010

[14:17:11] matt [wronka.org]/Merch MeeGo is effectively killing the best part of Maemo, the community. The draft of the spec is in RFC stage, but it sounds like it'll be an up-cliff battle at this point for MeeGo to have a full-fledged dependency-checking package managent system. Instead, the steering committee (Intel and Nokia) are hoping to convert it to use a restricyed Android/IOS packaging model in the hopes, apparently, of catching-up with the other platforms. The packaging system for Android is a simplicity for the system; it isn't an ideal, and it certainly isn't the secret sauce. If Nokia wants to try and copy Android/IOS it should look to the the development model (actions) of Android and the perceived simplicity of IOS' UI.