The “scrolling smoothness” issue – Nexus 7 vs iPad 2
While you can see from my numerous posts that I have become a huge Nexus 7 and Android fan, and I think the Android OS is superior to iOS in that it lets you get more things done, I have to say that the scrolling experience in the iPad 2 is still better than in the Nexus 7.
I don’t know if it is the OS or the apps themselves, but scrolling seems to be more “picky and sticky” on the Nexus 7 than on the iPad. The apps I use are things like Chrome, FaceBook, Zite, Currents, HuffPost, etc.
On the Nexus 7 the scrolling experience is a tad jerky. And sometimes if you are scrolling by touching in “not quite the right place” you have to try again. This never happens in the iPad 2 in mobile Safari or those same iOS version of the above apps. Scrolling is always smoother on the iPad 2.
I’m not saying the experience on the Nexus 7 is bad, I’m just saying, despite all its other benefits, it isn’t as smooth an experience as the iPad 2 when using apps with scrolling. I wonder why that is so?
I’ve seen some online lab tests reporting the same thing with game apps.
What do others think?
doug
My daily driver phone is an iPhone 5 and I’ve recently replaced my iPad 2 with a Nexus 7. I would completely agree with everything you said. While I love my Nexus 7 and I’m liking android more and more each day… There are aspects of iOS that are simply better and scrolling is one of them. I also find that selecting text and moving the cursor in iOS is easier. Despite these issues, I am still planning on replacing my iphone 5 with the new Nexus 5 (or whatever is replacing the nexus 4) when it arrives.
Interesting enough, some graphics-intensive effects are perfectly smooth – such as the page turning effect in FlipBoard. So I wonder how much of it is the device or Android itself and how much of it is with the developers. Or perhaps the SDK they have to work with. Chrome itself though doesn’t have the smoothest scrolling.
Anyway, I still love the device.
My first-generation Nexus 7 isn’t exactly smooth either. I have always assumed it was just limited by the hardware capabilities but maybe it could indeed be improved by better coding.