Hacker News Thread on Charles Ying’s Piece on Android and GPU Acceleration

The Hacker News thread on Ying’s article is interesting. There’s an Android user named Jonathan Rockway who first comments:

But the thing is, nobody actually cares about this. I have used an Android phone since the beginning. Touch responsiveness is not something I have ever noticed. Any delay in rendering web pages is due to the network.

But later on in the thread Rockway acknowledges:

I turn animations off. Useless eye candy that just wastes the battery.

Also, is it really fair to compare the N1, a phone that’s over a year old, to brand-new WP7 phones?

So one of the few people in the thread defending Android’s UI performance is someone who admittedly turns off animations.

“Android has a stuttery UI” doesn’t mean “Android is bad” or “Android is useless” or even necessarily “Android is not the best mobile OS”. It just means that Android has a stuttery UI.

Update: What I find fascinating about this is how many Android partisans continue to insist not that the problem doesn’t matter, but that the problem doesn’t exist. That it’s a fabrication made up by iOS (and, now, I suppose, Windows Phone 7) partisans. Tell an iPhone fan that the iOS notification system is kind of lame and they’ll probably agree. Tell an Android fan that their UI rendering is stuttery and they lash out.

★ Tuesday, 4 January 2011