Tag: UI

This is how it feels like scrolling through a window in Android

For purposes of this illustration, I used a Samsung Galaxy S II (SGS2) running on Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) and the official Twitter app for Android version 3.2.2.

When Samsung introduced the SGS2 last year, they promised amazing speeds with its 1.2 GHz dual-core processor. But then, obviously, this video is a testament at how hiccups happen brought about more likely by the ever-famous Android UI lag. Look at how the scrolling abruptly stops to open the details of a tweet when you mean it to continue scroll up.

Although I sampled only a single app for this demonstration, it is in fact fairly representative of the whole Android experience — that in Android, the system responds to presses that were never intended in the first place.

The Android UI Lag

Even for a dual-core 1.2GHz device like the Samsung Galaxy S II (SGS2), while running on Android 2.3 Gingerbread, I could still really tell the UI lag when scrolling, especially when compared to a single-core device like the iPhone 4.

Take for example the official Twitter app. While swiping your fingers from bottom to top to scroll through earlier tweets in your timeline, sometimes the scrolling would stop at the tweet you last put your fingers to, as if you were trying to select or tap on that particular tweet and not swipe through it. This happened so often it actually got so frustrating.

Andrew Munn has a very good explanation why this is so with any Android device: Continue reading