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Android 4.0: A coming of age and homage to Windows Phone 7
- chugger 15y agoHomage to Windows phone 7. How about we call it what it is. A Windows 7 rip-off.
- Roritharr 15y agowhen do people finally get it? everything is a remix.
- drivebyacct2 15y agoI thought it was an iPhone ripoff? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3124131 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3124131
- oakgrove 15y agoWhy would they rip off an OS with essentially no market share and dropping fast from there. Windows Phone tiles are just widgets under a different name.
- recoiledsnake 15y agoAll this while comparing Metro to a lavatory sign and dissing Apple's design too. From http://thisismynext.com/2011/10/18/exclusive-matias-duarte-ice-cream-sandwich-galaxy-nexus/ http://thisismynext.com/2011/10/18/exclusive-matias-duarte-i... “Across the board Google and Android is taking design a lot more seriously,” Matias says, and points out that Roboto is used throughout the system. “There’s this thing that’s happening right now in user interface design that I find kind of shackling. The faux wood paneling trend, and the airport lavatory signage trend.” He laughs when he says this and pulls up a slide on his computer, a split screen of an Atari 2600 and… airport lavatory signage. It’s an obvious dig at both Apple and Microsoft.
- mrsebastian 15y agoAye -- conflicting, for sure. ICS is definitely a little more fancy than Metro, but that might just be because ICS has a higher resolution (note the two-line previews in Gmail -- only possible because of a higher resolution).
- oakgrove 15y agoThe comparisons are very appropriate.
- jinushaun 15y agoApple cranked up the textures to 11 in iOS 5. So ugly and juvenile... I really find it difficult to believe that this is the same company that produced the gorgeous iPhone OS in 2007.
- cpeterso 15y agoFor example, I can deal with Apple's brushed metal, but who thought a faux leather GUI was a good idea??
- joebadmo 15y agoStrikes me as a healthy blend of homage and criticism. I think WP7 looks great, but agree that it's kind of austere. I think a culture of innovators regularly taking the best of each other's ideas and making them their own, putting their own spin, their own personality on them is fantastic. I'm so pleasantly surprised by this. I was totally expecting just another feature dump or change-for-change's-sake/shallow modernization UI refresh like every other one before this. I'm really excited about Android having a clear user-centered vision. Not just because I'm an Android user, but because it's great for everyone that there's this level of competition in the industry.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- vegai 15y agoEhm, what are you seeing? The screenshots in the article at least are quite unlike each other, and they're clearly different applications. Is this guy a Microsoft employee or shareholder?
- baddox 15y ago> Android is ready and eager to drop its mantle as the nerd and power user OS. > We all know that Android is the geeky option. This doesn't match my notion of the Android and Apple ecosystems.
- Mizza 15y agoFo' real. Anybody who thinks this only reads tech news and doesn't deal with mobile phone consumers in the real world. Android is the _cheap_ option. You can get Android burners now on budget telcos like Cricket and MetroPCS. Geeks like it too, but that's not the massive perception of the OS. It's becoming just the default phone.
- baddox 15y agoHonestly, the only passionate defense I've seen for Android has seemingly been nothing more than thinly-veiled rejection of Apple, from people who are staunchly anti-Apple. I've never heard anyone seriously defend Android for being consumer-friendly, or easy to use, or fast/smooth, etc.
- te_chris 15y agoI have an iPad 2 and a Nexus S and my GF has an iPhone 4. I build iOS apps. I know my way around the cocoa API and the devices and for day to day use I much prefer my Nexus. The deep google integration is fantastic and vanilla android on the nexus is a polished experience (sans hardware accelerated animations), much more so than all the crappy OEM interfaces. I'll give you fast/smooth, but from now on, I can't see my next phone being anything other than a Nexus.
- wuster 15y agoGoogle Maps with Voice Navigation was the killer app that made me ditch iPhone 3G for Nexus One. Now with Nexus S, I haven't looked back. If your digital life is in Google apps, a Nexus phone is a very sensible choice. I'm not willing to put up with carrier crapware on non-Nexus phones though. That would be too big of a compromise for me.
- Adaptive 15y agoNot an homage at all. ICS and Metro are both examples of Swiss style maturing in mobile UI design. Apple at its best in iOS is similarly executing Swiss style.
- cpeterso 15y agoAnd at its worst, Apple gives us faux leather GUIs.
- nl 15y agoI call bullshit. Sure, they have found a couple of Android screens that have squares on them, and it is true that both Microsoft and Google are rejecting the "analogy" approach for UI that Apple has embraced. But that is as far as it goes. Look at the Android lock screen or the start screen and you'll see they are totally different. Android simply doesn't use the card-based metaphor that Windows uses. (Also, note that Duarte came from Palm - surely it would be more interesting to see how WebOS influenced Android than Windows did?)