Surprised at ICS - not necessarily in a good way

[Joelist]

I am getting ready to buy a tablet, and over the past couple of days got to try the Galaxy Tab 2, Transformer Prime, Transformer Pad TF300 and the Acer Iconia A300 (I think). All had ICS.

While I liked a lot of what I saw, one thing really disappointed me. All of them were choppy and laggy in transitions. Scrolling screens were choppy and laggy, app opening/closing was likewise and even typing had an intermittent choppy lag. I remember this behavior from my prior attempts at a tablet, which were Honeycomb tablets (Xoom and Galaxy Tab). Back then this caused me to finally return the device and give up in hopes that ICS would fix it.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is there some way to optimize ICS to smooth it out? I am not inclined to get a tablet with this sort of experience - much as I despise Apple at least iOS on the iPad is buttery smooth and doesn't lag.

 

[jmarkey77]

I've had my tablet for a few weeks. After first startup it was laggy, later I realized that's because the os and apps were updating. Has been super smooth ever since. I upgraded from a blackberry palaybook.

Sent from my ASUS Transformer Pad TF300T using Android Central Forums

 

[monkeyluis]

I have the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 & while I like it a lot, it is not as smooth as my iPad. So yes I agree it can be a little choppy.

 

[lethalgorman]

Acer a500 has been butter smooth since my ics update

Sent from my SGH-T989 using Android Central Forums

 

[Shadowriver]

It's matter of hardware. Don't have Android tablet, but when i play with them on store even lot of honeycomb tablets does not work smooth either. I see that also on emulator (or should i say virtualizator since x86 system image came out), phone mode works butter smooth where tablet mode is laggy.

Well let's not lie to ourselfs... Android is more demending then iOS, most software runs on Java and allows to do background process where iOS is 100% native and Apple does not limiting background processing for no reason. But Android Tablet hardware is still young and should overcome software in matter of year or 2

 

[Joelist]

So no way anyone knows to tweak it to get rid of the jittery behavior....darn!

Hardware wise the Android tablets with ICS smoke an iPad (Tegra 3 or S4). That stuff is STILL janky points to lack of properly optimized drivers I guess. I was hoping someone had heard of optimizations a user could perform but I guess that stuff is not exposed to user control.

 

[cole2kb]

My suggestion would be to look into rooting and custom ROMs for the devices you're interested in. See if any of them report these issues for that specific device sorted out.

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[Joelist]

Hi all!

Thanks for the ROM suggestion - I went rooting around on XDA and discovered something important.

It appears that the janky behavior I am seeing (and some others mentioned) goes back to poor optimization of Dalvik. One of the developers there has a packaged script file which alters the settings of DVM (and memory management too I think) to smooth the experience out. Another one suggested using an app named System Tuner where these settings can be tweaked without needing to run a shell script every time you start up.

Next step for me then is deciding on a tablet to try and also finding out what the settings are that need to be tweaked - apparently one of them controls ICS storing running programs in RAM.

If this works and is safe, it does lead one to wonder why the OEMs are not doing tweaking like this before release.

 

[Go Android!]

Just get the Microsoft Surface. Although Microsoft is locking the bootloader, my hopes is that XDA can somehow get Android on it. But that'll be several months from now.

 

[Joelist]

I have also given the Surface serious thought, especially as it comes with full Office on it and the cover/keyboard is bundled. But right just now I am thinking of finding out what the correct settings are, getting a TF300, installing System Tuner and seeing if the settings really do make ICS behave correctly.

And as stated earlier, if they do then a different question should be asked - why on earth aren't the OEM's doing this type of tuning BEFORE RELEASING THE #$%^& TABLET!!!

 

[feelinfroggy23]

You have to realize when you try them out in the store, everyone and their family have been playing with it. Opening/closing apps, pushing random , ect. But once i brought my tab home it was android smooth. Every android I've had has never been as smooth as the iphone/ipad. But that's it! That's all apple has is the smooth os. And its not like android glitch is terrible. Most of the time itnis smooth but yes there is that occasional hic up. Android is the future.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I727 using Tapatalk 2

 

[Joelist]

Don't underrate smooth. User experience is absolutely crucial and the better user experience will beat out arguments like "it's open" every time.

I tested tablets both in the store and at home - same behavioral issues. Curiously the phones don't seem to display it so much but the tablets do. On XDA they believe that the problems stems from memory management and Dalvik tuning. We shall see.