Gadgetory

everybody it's michael fisher with pocketnow.com last video we showed you how to install the cm9 build of Android Ice Cream Sandwich on the HP TouchPad tablet since it's been seven days it's time to review it but since there's already plenty of reviews out there of cm9 on the touch pad this time we're going to take it from the perspective of someone who used and loved webos me I'll show you what Android does better what it does worse we'll go on a bug hunt it's pocket now let's start right off by talking about one of the more interesting elements of the touchpad the touchstone charging dock now with cm9 loaded on the touchpad you do just still drop it on there and it still works which is really really nice and you get a nice little blown up time view in android that's all right in webos by contrast you drop it on the touchstone and sure you can get a time view if you want but you can also use any number of touchstone enabled exhibition applications so for example you can use this application called glimpse to show you time whether twitter news despite the fact that i have a dual monitor setup on my desktop this is how I get most of my up-to-date information throughout the day when the touchpad is running webos there are other applications of course like a weather dashboard of Facebook plug-in and other exhibition apps that leverage this feature gonna have to call webOS a winner on this one now let's talk about user interface a little bit in webos apps or houston cards which you can flick away slide back and forth between it's made the task manager the core method of interacting with the OS instead of just a tacked-on afterthought swipes up from the bottom allow you to get back to card view where you can manage dismiss arrange and basically do anything you want with your open applications by contrast with ice cream sandwich your main function keys are located in the lower left where you can call up a multitasking view return to the home screen or press the back button in some applications sometimes that key turns into a keyboard dismissal button which is handy swiping up from the bezel gets you know where it doesn't bring up your applications drawer for that you have to go all the to the upper right-hand corner of the screen and tap the applications button swiping up from the lower right gets you to the Notification Center which is handy and another swipe up will dismiss it and finally going back up to the upper right we switch over to the upper left if you want to do a Google search or if you want to interact with the tablet with your voice got that yes the Android approach is a lot less intuitive and if you're coming from a webos device it takes a while to get used to Android seems to really want you to use all four corners of that device and keep your hand moving across the canvas of the display as much as possible why I don't know now as many of you know matias duarte who was in charge of designing most of webos has since moved over to google to become the head of the android user experience and that shows a bit an Ice Cream Sandwich most prominently in the multitasking display where you can call up a list of recently used applications and if you want to get rid of them from the list you can toss them off the screen this doesn't appear to close the applications or it does close some of the applications and doesn't others just remove them from the launcher is inconsistent it's a little taste of what webOS offered but it's more window dressing than anything still it's a lot more handy than what we saw in previous iterations of Android as far as task management goes a very basic but very welcome addition to the touch pads keyboard in webos was the addition of a full number row at the top of the keyboard which prevented you from having to switch back and forth with Shift key every time you needed to enter numerals now that is not present on the Android version of the keyboard it's a minor inconvenience but it's still an inconvenience by contrast both keyboards both web OS and Android offer a tab key which is really really handy when you're filling in multiple fields like on pizza order forms or address fields or credit card fields anywhere in the browser where you have to jump between many fields you don't want to keep your fingers hopping back and forth between the keyboard and the display so I'm glad this option was thought of in both versions of the keyboard let's talk a little bit about bugs now we were using android version 403 cyanogenmod version alpha 0 dot 6 now this is an alpha so bugs are going to be there I'm not tearing them apart for for bugs being present like this is something you have to expect when you're running cm9 on the touchpad so first off the google music application did not function properly i could not get it to play any sound files at all in addition the camera functionality is not included in this particular build of cm9 for the touchpad so couldn't get the camera working and the touchpad only has a front facing camera so that's not really a big deal some more Exotic bugs happened in pandora if you left some applications running for a while went away and then came back to them they would fail to respond in this instance pandora had stopped playing and no amount of pressing on any of the keys could get it to start playing again tried to jump into the task manager and throw it away like i would have done in webos jump back into the application but that didn't seem to have any kind of effect a little frustrating try to reboot and you'll notice some touch screen responsiveness problems on the touch pad that is not unique to android by the way that is that problem is going to be dealt with by any user of the touchpad it seems no matter what operating system you're running thankfully a reboot did fix that particular problem but then we run into another one when the touchpad display goes to sleep the music quality goes with it this is a bug that I could only reproduce maybe seventy to eighty percent of the time but it was still annoying you have to keep the touchpad awake whenever I wanted to listen music the last bug I'm going to talk about was the biggest one I ran into and the week i was using cm9 on the touchpad and hands down the biggest impediment to productivity I ran into at all the keyboard software on this build of cyanogen mod nine cannot keep up with your keystrokes if you're typing quickly if you start off typing slowly if you're a very slow typer it's not going to be an issue for you once you start speeding up though the bug becomes apparent the best way to describe it is that the spacebar trips on itself it probably has something to do with the autocorrect library lagging so that when it tries to update the ribbon of possible words you mean along the top of the keyboard it trips on itself but the end result is that when the spacebar is tapped it registers as a DoubleTap more often than not if you're going fast this leads to periods in the middle of your sentence all the time needless to say it's awkward and it doesn't result in a great typing experience in fact it's really very very frustrating and it makes the touchpad borderline unusable for any kind of typing whether you're messaging emailing facebooking anything that requires text input via the keyboard well it just turns to garbage thankfully the cyanogenmod team is incredibly resourceful and very talented if there's not a fix out there already there probably will be by the time this video goes live so on the comments to our last video featuring this device there were a lot of requests for benchmark results thanks for the comments guys and here's your benchmark tests on the webOS we used an app called lithium benchmark HD which yielded us a performance index of 140 and on the Android side we got a quadrant result of 26 22 so the takeaway is even though ice cream sandwich has brought major improvements to Android as far as user experience and user interface goes webos is still more elegant and it still runs more smoothly than the Alpha that's available for the touch pad right now that's not saying it's better it's just saying that for the majority of the functions I needed it for in my week with the touch pad as a content consumption device and occasional social interaction device webos worked better and more reliably now I could not do as much obviously even though the android market is no place to brag about as far as tablet apps go the heat palm app catalog or excuse me the HP app catalog is even more barren at least now that HP has given up on things in addition one of the notes I took during this review period was pretty telling I was out at a bar waiting for some friends to arrive and I was using the tablet to do something and I took a note to myself that red I feel more like I'm using a computer than I do with the iPad or with webos depending on who you are that could be a good thing or a bad thing what I meant was that it felt like a more complete computing experience in Ice Cream Sandwich now that's interesting to say the least there's a lot of potential here just like in the broader android tablet market but only time will tell if it's going to be fulfilled that's it for this one guys once again it's michael fisher with pocketnow.com from the camera on the HP TouchPad thanks for tuning in for this one if you liked what you saw leave us a like leave us a comment if you didn't let us know what you didn't like most importantly tune in next time we'll see you then you