Why iOS is winning. Android (still) isn't ready for prime time
Summary for the impatient: My superb Asus Transformer Prime tablet is hampered by a substandard Android ICS user expereince. Android still isn't ready for prime time, and the evidence is in its wholesale slaughter by the iPad in the putative tablet market.
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In February of this year, I had finally saved enough money to buy a tablet for myself. I considered buying a iPad, but Angi has one through her work, so we always have one around. Since I work in user experience, I wanted to see what Android had to offer.
I bought the best Android tablet on the market at the time, the Asus Transformer Prime. And a little while later, I bought the keyboard that goes with it, turning it into a superb convertible tablet/netbook.
The Transformer Prime is a very nice device. It has 32GB of RAM, a Tegra quad-core processor, HDMI out, a full USB port on the keyboard, a gorgeous screen, and a rock-solid chiclet keyboard that detaches and attaches easily. Typing on it is a breeze. (I'm typing this blog entry on it now.) The keyboard comes with an additional battery, adding another 9 hours of battery life to the 9 hours onboard battery. It is a superbly engineered gadget, better than the iPad 2, its contemporary.
And it came with the latest Android OS, "Ice Cream Sandwich." I had heard good things about ICS, but the experience is lacking.
ICS is supposed to be a tablet and phone operating system, but its dialog boxes often include extraneous phone information. My tablet doesn't have a phone number or a radio that can talk to the phone network, but many apps assume that it does. So many app preferences include information about 3G data and getting text messages. Many apps scale up very poorly on the larger screen. For example, the Facebook app is terrible on Android, but it's terrible writ large on a tablet screen, not taking into account screen size, so it looks like a giant phone app. This mistake is repeated in many apps.
The ICS experience is lacking in many ways. While the iPad handles our corporate network at work just fine, allowing users to use almost all of the Intranet applications, ICS doesnt' work at all. (It's a DNS problem) There are many lesser irritations with the user interface, but nothing that would prevent me from using the device.
But there is one unforgiveable problem that I just can't get past. The browsers on Android are all terrible. The built-in browser, which is called "Browser," is almost unusable. Virtually every page load freezes the browser, so I have to choose to kill the app or "wait." As soon as I hit "wait," the page unfreezes and I can read it. The built-in browser supposedly supports Flash, a major selling feature of Android. But Flash is a horror on Android, even on a quad-core Tegra device that is more powerful than most computers were just a few years ago.
Part of the problem is that the device is always updating itself, and even on a quad-core Tegra, it can't update apps in the background and browse the web at the same time. Automatic updates makes the browser even more unusable. This problem seems to plague all the browsers, except Opera, and I've tried them all.
I thought Opera was the answer; it's a good browser. But recently Opera has started to crash randomly. So I'm left without a good option for the most fundamental operation of tablet computing - browsing the web.
Android fanboys will respond that the Android OS is more free and open than iOS, so of course it will have these kinds of problems. That's why there is no "tablet market," only an iPad market. Regular humans don't care a whit about the difficulty of making the user experience work well in a fragemented, relatively open environment. Android fanboys will also point out that Android's marketshare is exploding in the phone market.
But the tablet market is the real test of Android versus iOS. The iPad slaughters the competition. When users aren't offered a free device, when they aren't encumbered by the limitations of their wireless carrier, they choose iOS, because the iOS user experience is far superior to Android's.
I still love the Tranformer Prime as a gadget, and I suspect that an Opera or other browser update will eventually fix my browser problems. So I'll likely keep the device. But I'm not a regular human. I'll put up with the garbage because I love technology and gadgets. For people who want a tablet that just works, and works beautifully, the iPad is the only option. As much as I love the Transformer Prime as a gadget, I can't recommend it to anyone but the most hardcore geeks because it is encumbered by an inferior operating system.
