Android ICS let down
My ASUS eee pad Transformer Prime finally arrived, and wow, am I ever disappointed. Not in the hardware mind you, the device itself is absolutely gorgeous. My disappointment is in Android.
Prior to the TFP, the only Android device I’ve owned is my Kindle Fire. Granted, I’ve played with plenty of my friend’s Android devices, as well as tablets in stores and such, but this was my first personal experience owning and attempting to use a “normal” tablet running Android for any real period of time on my own.
As stated in a previous post, the TFP was an experiment to move more of my daily workflow to hosted services, i.e. the cloud. The experience has been brutal to say the least. None of the web services I intended to use function passably, if at all, on Android ICS, in any web browser available for Android. Google’s integration of their services into Android is excellent though, better than Apple and their iCloud even, but the rest of the ecosystem was not particularly pleasant to use. It was actually quite painful in fact. Say what you will about Apple’s ecosystem, but it is a lot more seamless and integrated. I tend to use things that work well for me, independent of which company created them, and that is not currently Android, even in ICS.
A bit fortuitously, late last week the first untethered jailbreak was released for A5 based iOS devices, which finally gave me a chance to JB my iPad2 and give the 3rd party Bluetooth stack a go. In addition to the Bluetooth stack, there are lots of invaluable apps and mods available for the iPad in the jailbreak world. These mods, plus a 3rd party driver that lets one use an external mouse AND keyboard with the iPad, which so far is whooping the experience I had with Android. The web services I use work with iOS’ mobile safari, and there are several extremely good native apps that can supplant my desktop IDE and facilitate a more cloud centric development workflow. These plus the mouse and cursor from the jailbreak are what I was hoping to achieve with Android.
Perfect timing jailbreak community, perfect timing. On another topic, I learned OfficeDepot has a comparatively unfriendly return policy on technology items. Namely, they don’t accept them. At all. exchanges if defective only according to the policy online, and via the store manager I spoke to. Note to self, never buy a technology item, or anything for that matter, from OfficeDepot again.