Database Users

How to improve Android GUI experience

I hope this isn't perceived as spamming or fishing for votes. I think most of us would like to see a smoother Android GUI instead of that choppyness on our 1GHz phones. I and many people believe that Google can do something about this but are not prioritizing this as they should. I think we can change this by visiting and voting here, clicking on the star under the headline, if we want to see a change: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=6914
Who knows, if we start voting now, maybe they will implement this feature in the next Android version.
P.S. You need a Google account to be able to vote.
EDIT: Maybe this is why we haven't seen it yet?
From what I've heard, the fault lies mostly with HTC, encouraged by wholesale indifference by the carriers. Here's the story I was told:
* Qualcomm makes the core chipset used by most HTC phones, and most Android phones were built by HTC until VERY recently. Thus, the things that got the most attention during Android's first year and a half of commercial availability were things directly supported by HTC phones.
* The price charged by Qualcomm for its chipset varies, depending upon what features the handset manufacturer chooses to license from them. Put another way, every Qualcomm chip in a given family has the silicon resources to do everything... but manufacturers are only allowed to use the features they pay Qualcomm for the right to use.
* Because the carriers don't care, and the carriers are HTC's real customers, HTC didn't care about GPU support, either. It saved a few cents per phone, and washed its hands of GPU support to boot.
* Making matters worse, Qualcomm only makes its chipset documentation available under NDA (at least, the parts dealing with "premium" capabilities), and only made it available to licensees (of which there were very, very few). Ergo, the documentation has been VERY hard to come by, and less likely to be leaked by a public-minded HTC employee for the good of humanity.
Put another way, there probably isn't a thing Qualcomm can do to stop the folks at xda-developers.com from releasing guerrilla video drivers for HTC Android phones that take advantage of acceleration if they can figure out how it works, but you'll never see a phone come out of the box new with GPU acceleration unless HTC officially licenses the capability from Qualcomm. Nor will you see Google making it easy to do an end-run around the official release to graft it on, because then Qualcomm would sue THEM.
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- This is from: http://androidforums.com/android-news-talk/29584-why-doesnt-androids-gui-use-gpu-acceleration.html

I starred it.
Definitely is bizarre that GPU integration isn't enabled in Android 2.1+

This hardware-can-do-qualcom-wont-allow-it is old...
It happens with a LOT of devices...
Sent from my HTC Desire using XDA App

I'm glad to see that we are climbing on the chart of issues.
I have come to notice that the issue of the choppy Android experience is not only a problem because of the lack of GPU acceleration. Android phones tend to respond to our gestures way too exactly. This results in uneven transitions, one half of the animation is fast and the other half is slower. This unevenness being a result of us not making, or following through, with perfectly even movements in terms of speed. I believe this is something Apple has addressed and they did it very nicely because even though you are moving your fingers unevenly and slowly, the UI transitions follows your finger in an even and smooth fashion but in a speed that matches your finger. This looks phenomenal. Same goes for faster input gestures, the Ios (iOS) responds in an even and smooth fashion but the transition is faster.

It was the same with my old HD1, the xda gpu-drivers helped alot. Looks like we'll have to take the matter into our own hands again.
Wasn't HTC mass-sued for this a while back?

Syc said:
It was the same with my old HD1, the xda gpu-drivers helped alot. Looks like we'll have to take the matter into our own hands again.
Wasn't HTC mass-sued for this a while back?
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Nope. There was a whole load of talk of it over the TyTn II debacle, but the only thing to ever come of that was the rather excellent XDA GPU drivers.

I hate to admit this, but if Google, or whoever it is responsible, doesn't do something about this, I'll have to look elsewhere (Iphone). It might sound crazy but it's that important to me. I mean, it's so basic. Why add mega-ultra-fiction features and all other sh*t, when you don't know how to make a smooth transition. The basic element of the GUI.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like Apple, their policy or their attitude towards the rest. However, I'm being honest about this: they care. I haven't seen one Android phone capable of delivering smooth transitions although they are more powerful than the Iphones. On the one hand you have a team utilizing the entire potential of their sh**ty phones, and on the other hand you have a team doesn't give a rats a*s about the hardware in them.
I don't know if Google is to blame or the phone manufacturers. I just don't like the idea of owning a 1 GHz CPU and an awesome GPU (Samsung Galaxy S) and not being able to use it.

Sorry to bump an old thread.
Has there been any progress on this issue?

Using spare parts and setting all the window animations and transitions to very slow has made everything "smoother" to me for all purposes of discussion. during the slow but smooth transition, my phone has time to fully load the next screen or popup menu, therefore it all appears to happen seamlessly.

android is very smooth on my Hd2 ... Did you try a cyanogen mod build ?

Sorry, i was referring more towards the GPU being actively used by the UI front end.
Im using a Legend with Azure's cyanogen mod (froyo) things are pretty slick but I can tell when there are slowdowns, but the worst offender is definately the web browser.
The best example I can find is going to the html5 test website, I get a score of around 180 and the iphone about 140, but the legend browser (built in and Dolphin) really struggles to scroll that page, whereas on the Iphone its extremely smooth. Its these kind of inconsistencies which are annoying.
Another gripe is the whole portrait-landscape switch, its not gpu based in the least and its a rather half assed solution at the minute (visually). But I understand that no app could ever interfere with how this works as its so deep in the os? Such a shame.
I work in animation which is why im overly critical

Official Honeycomb/Android 3.0 Preview + MotoXoom

Just found this, looks new, thought I'd share,.....

Looks interesting but it said "build entirely for tablet". Apparently, we won't see this version on our phones. Maybe they have a mobile version.. well of course they will but I hope it's not striped down too much. Gingerbread was a ui disaster... ugly as sin, imo

Only for tablets? Don't care.

Even with gods like TeamDouche on the case?
Fingers crossed. I'll be looking at purchasing a tablet in the next 6 - 9 months anyway I reckon.

wileykat said:
Even with gods like TeamDouche on the case?
Fingers crossed. I'll be looking at purchasing a tablet in the next 6 - 9 months anyway I reckon.
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Well the UI would be horribad on a tiny phone screen, so it really has no purpose to me. I wish Google would just branch the OS completely into Android for phones and Android for tablets instead of making 3.0 "exclusive."

If those videos are genuine renders, then it looks like they've fixed surface flinger to use OGL rather than FB.
Note that this video looks a lot more like ChromeOS than Android. Android 3.0 itself will NOT be restricted to tablets, but possibly some UI elements will be available (i.e. optional) to improve the utility on tablets. Android 2.x would NOT be suitable for a tablet.
What I see is a more conventional taskbar for multiple open programs... and a windowing manager. These are definitely things that can be added *on top* of the existing android.... i.e., on phones, use the long-click-home, on tablets, stick them in the bar up top (since you have the space for it and it is more intuitive). Combined with a more suitable launcher and a windowing manager, and you have a winner.
I suspect that their "exclusively for tablets" line relates to the preview itself, which is to highlight the tablet-specific features.

Dig deeper and you will find Honeycomb will be adjusted to fit phones also...

TheBiles said:
Well the UI would be horribad on a tiny phone screen, so it really has no purpose to me. I wish Google would just branch the OS completely into Android for phones and Android for tablets instead of making 3.0 "exclusive."
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Maybe 4.0 r exclusive for android phones.. LoL
Sent from my HTC Vision using XDA App

jeffokada81 said:
Dig deeper and you will find Honeycomb will be adjusted to fit phones also...
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Had a quick search earlier whilst having my breakfast,.... only thing I could find was AbodeAir benchmarks off a N1 running 3.0. Fingers crossed still.

I suspect the "Build entirely for tablets" thing is just a bit badly worded/misleading.
The video is clearly aimed to show all the cool stuff they've done for tablet support (they really should have waited for 3.0 before releasing some of the rubbish Android tablets that are out there), and I'm sure there will be some specific 3.0 stuff for phones too, as others have said.

ice cream sandwich..

Do you guys think ice cream sandwich can keep up with ios's smoothness? I used to hate apple and still don't like itmuch, but if ice cream sandwich won't be at least almost as smooth as ios, then i will definitely think about getting an ipad and selling my android tablet.. ios 5 has a lot of features that can keep up with current android, and it gives a really good experience with buttery smooth transition animation, although a little less feature. I know we should wait till tmr to find out all the features of ics, but do you guys think it will be smooth with no lag, especially the jerkiness when scrolling?

If your tablet is exceedingly jerky you should try wiping it or getting a replacement.
Besides that, I have no doubt that there will be plenty of under the hood improvements along with the UI updates.

Thanar said:
If your tablet is exceedingly jerky you should try wiping it or getting a replacement.
Besides that, I have no doubt that there will be plenty of under the hood improvements along with the UI updates.
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I was going to say... "what jerkiness?"

Cactus42 said:
I was going to say... "what jerkiness?"
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If you've ever used a current ios device then you know exactly what he's talking about. my a500 overclocked at 1.5 on a fresh install, is nowhere near as smooth as an ios device. There are certain jitters when performing certain actions. And lag when typing is a huge issue, that I can't seem to fix regardly of rom choice keyboard choice or overclock settings.

I'd recommend waiting until tomorrow night. They might pull out something "amazing" like with froyo and increase speed across the board again.

What little I have been reading about it Google is really working on UI, including trying to speed up transitions and effects. Whether or not they succeed remains to be seen, so my advice is: don't throw out the baby with the bath-water. Wait until you get a chance to actually try it YOURSELF once it's out and ignore rumours.

Yea comparing to ios, my tablet (usually smooth) is very jittery. And one thing that I haven't been doing much but started doing a lot is using it in portrait mode, and I just can't stand the lag.. and i really hope there will be at least close amount of various animation that are present in ios..and I REALLY hope the scrolling lag will be gone, like in youtube app, or actually any other app, when scrolling while loading image or something, is laggy. After I've spent some time with ios in a retail store, I really can't stand the lag haha..
WereCatf said:
What little I have been reading about it Google is really working on UI, including trying to speed up transitions and effects. Whether or not they succeed remains to be seen, so my advice is: don't throw out the baby with the bath-water. Wait until you get a chance to actually try it YOURSELF once it's out and ignore rumours.
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And yea, I hope they succeed. I will definitely try it out. I THINK windows phone 7 is pretty smooth and ios is of course smooth but was wondering, why the biggest software company cant make their os better. Than apple and microsoft. I mean that in the general transition effect in terms of smoothness, not the OS features.

sw6lee said:
And yea, I hope they succeed. I will definitely try it out. I THINK windows phone 7 is pretty smooth and ios is of course smooth but was wondering, why the biggest software company cant make their os better. Than apple and microsoft. I mean that in the general transition effect in terms of smoothness, not the OS features.
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Well, atleast partially the reason is technical: Apple's iOS is all native code AFAIK and tuned for Apple's hardware. After all, Apple controls all the parts that go to their devices and only choose parts that they know will work on iOS. Google on the other hand has to provide an OS platform that is a lot more malleable and can run on a wide range of devices with wildly differing characteristics, so it creates some overhead. Plus Android isn't native code, so again that creates some execution overhead.
And well, remember that iOS builds on OSX, it's just streamlined and tuned for mobile devices whereas Android is a completely new OS and Google doesn't have much previous experience in OS development. Ie. Apple has a lot of headway compared to Google and it'll take some time for Google to catch up.

WereCatf said:
Well, atleast partially the reason is technical: Apple's iOS is all native code AFAIK and tuned for Apple's hardware. After all, Apple controls all the parts that go to their devices and only choose parts that they know will work on iOS. Google on the other hand has to provide an OS platform that is a lot more malleable and can run on a wide range of devices with wildly differing characteristics, so it creates some overhead. Plus Android isn't native code, so again that creates some execution overhead.
And well, remember that iOS builds on OSX, it's just streamlined and tuned for mobile devices whereas Android is a completely new OS and Google doesn't have much previous experience in OS development. Ie. Apple has a lot of headway compared to Google and it'll take some time for Google to catch up.
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I truly love your informative posts... Thanks for being a part of this community.

Euclid's Brother said:
I truly love your informative posts... Thanks for being a part of this community.
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Eh. I'm somewhat surprised to get such feedback, usually I just hear that I'm an arrogant bastard. But well, thanks. I just saw an opportunity for giving some real feedback in an effort to stop an oncoming flamewar.

WereCatf said:
Eh. I'm somewhat surprised to get such feedback, usually I just hear that I'm an arrogant bastard. But well, thanks. I just saw an opportunity for giving some real feedback in an effort to stop an oncoming flamewar.
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arrogant bastard, a great beer!

Come on, don't give up on android, for sure ios have by far the most smooth scrolling, but android gave you the fun to improving it. I get alot of satisfaction by flashing roms, kernels, overclocking, overcharging or simply playing around with the theme and designing your own styling. It's open and free. ois is all about giving you something that's good at a ridiculously high price...

iOS is definitely more refined when it comes to animations, ascetics, and fine detail. All of which creates a more pleasing (to look at) and responsive UI.
My iOS devices do occasionally succumb to the same animation stutters and laggy keyboard as my Android ones. However, usually only after a jailbreak and installing homebrew.
My biggest complaint with Android tablets (and android in general) is App support. Tablet app selection is dismal on Android and compatibility with 2.3 apps even worse.

sw6lee said:
Do you guys think ice cream sandwich can keep up with ios's smoothness? I used to hate apple and still don't like itmuch, but if ice cream sandwich won't be at least almost as smooth as ios, then i will definitely think about getting an ipad and selling my android tablet.. ios 5 has a lot of features that can keep up with current android, and it gives a really good experience with buttery smooth transition animation, although a little less feature. I know we should wait till tmr to find out all the features of ics, but do you guys think it will be smooth with no lag, especially the jerkiness when scrolling?
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iOS was built from the ground up to use very little memory and CPU cycles. Remember when you couldn't even multitask on there? Well now all that has changed but Apple is sticking to the principle.
Android on the other hand is built upon Linux. Google is doing the very best with the software and tools they have. If you imitate iOS and remove all your widgets and satisfy with just some icons on your home screens it's highly likely you'll mimic very closely the experience of iOS in terms of the OS being lag free. Of course this varies from person to person in what and how many apps they are running, etc. Any apps that run services will take some toll on the system; herein lies an example of a big difference between how Android vs. iOS works.
Widgets also use up a chunk of memory as well as CPU cycles at a time and are one of the priority reasons the software may lag, especially some of those flashy ones like CNN/News widgets, big ones like Music/Video widgets or constantly moving ones like Weather/Time widgets.
We can only wait and see what ICS will bring. There's no guarantee that it will be any faster/smoother than Honeycomb is; for me Honeycomb is pretty damned smooth. Also Vanilla Android/Honeycomb doesn't consist of that many animations to start with unless you get 3rd party launchers...but scrolling for me and launching apps carries little to no lag with it.
Keep in mind also that momentum has built up and hardware has caught up with software demands. My G1 with 1.6 cannot begin to compare to my myTouch4G with 2.3 on it. If the trend continues we can more than likely safely assume that any sort of lag will disappear as more powerful processors are introduced.
Ultimately it's up to you to decide what's more important to you.
I'm not sure I could give up my widgets at this point just to get smoother animations as I have grown accustomed to and am now depending on them.
If you think you like iOS more for any reason, especially if you feel it now matches Android in terms of features, I'd definitely make the switch sooner than later. I'd hate to spend money on Android apps and then have to buy them all over again on iOS.

When would we reasonably except ICS to be available for the Acer Iconia?
Either for Rooted users or in a OTA upgrade?

I'd say about a month. People will probably have it booting (but that'll be about it) day of the source being released though.

Another bloke confirmed that Acer is planning on supporting the A500 with ICS.

So, today is the day. I'm EST, so 10pm for me.
Rather than start a new thread, I'm just throwing this in here incase anyone wants to chat about it later.
youtube.com/android
Of course it's a Samsung event but it should still provide some tasty insights.
//pun off

gammaRascal said:
So, today is the day. I'm EST, so 10pm for me.
Rather than start a new thread, I'm just throwing this in here incase anyone wants to chat about it later.
youtube.com/android
Of course it's a Samsung event but it should still provide some tasty insights.
//pun off
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8:30 for central time

azoller1 said:
8:30 for central time
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Lolwut...
Beyond that, i've never understood why the quality of an os is judged on its fancy animations. Truth be told, when given the option, i turn animations off to the highest degree possible.

[Q] Android 4.0 and HD2 - Any future ?

With Android 4.0 release today. Im raising the question. Is there any future and posibility of Droid 4.0 on HTC HD2 - Is Hardware of HD2 even capable of handle this system ?

I've been wondering about the same thing myself. After playing with the Samsung Galaxy S2 I decided that it's nice, but the advantages are not great enough for me to justify the expense. Looks like the hardware of the new Nexus phone will be a slightly upgraded S2, so at the end of the day it is all down to software.
Right now it's probably a bit early to say, but I'd expect the OS itself should run on the HD2 hardware. Experience might be smoother on higher end phones though. Then again, new high end devices will start getting 720p displays and compared to the decent, but dated by now, 800x480 display that will be a big increase when it comes to pixels rendered. So you will be getting faster hardware, but the beautiful display will probably eat into that processing power a bit.
If tytung and others can port stock ICS to the HD2 then I can probably make it last long enough until they release the S3 or whatever equivalent HTC superphone (though considering HTC's track record over the past few months they really need to get their act together, but that's a separate conversation).
Then again, we've seen very little of the stuff that ICS can do. I have no clue how much of an improvement it will be over 2.3.5. I hope it will be awesome, but I guess I'll find out in approximately 90 minutes

Nil3E said:
With Android 4.0 release today. Im raising the question. Is there any future and posibility of Droid 4.0 on HTC HD2 - Is Hardware of HD2 even capable of handle this system ?
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Are you kidding? lol Our superphone has been able to run pretty much anything including the kitchen sink.
It's just a matter of time for the rom to be ported to the HD2

The geniuses we have cooking here can do anything but solve third world poverty and debt.
I reckon the big question should be How soon do you reckon there will be a development thread with ICS rom as the title.

Just finished watching the liveblog and I'm reading through updates on engadget and thisismynext.
Phone itself looks pretty sweet, but I guess that is off topic... so ICS.
First impression really good, though I have to wait to see some more hands on to form a more informed opinion. Though from an HD2 stand point there are a few things I am worried about:
1) face recognition unlock, personally I think it's a gimmick and I am almost 100% sure this can be disabled; the demo failure was pretty bad as well; but I wonder whether Google will include a new set of hardware requirements in the same way that Windows Phone 7 does; and if they do, to what extent can they be bypassed
2) no word on compatibility or updates with older devices; this was an event held to push the new OS and new Samsung made phone so naturally they would focus on this, but still I am a bit worried that Google might decide that they will only allow the OS to exist on new hardware and will somehow put restrictions that will be very hard to ignore. Then again I am writing this 10 minutes after the keynote has finished, while I'm waiting for the first hands-on updates so possibly this might not even be an issue 10 minutes from now I guess they were talking about integrating the software and hardware so tightly (and some of the new features look like they really take the advantage of 720p res) that I'm worried that the OS running on a single core 800x480 device will look a bit rubbish. Ah, and they mentioned 720p as the native res for ICS. I'm guessing other resolutions will be available since it's impossible google will just assume that even lower end smartphones will have 720p screen, but I'm a bit worried how the UI elements will interact with a lower res display.
Oh well. Time will tell.
Overall I'm pretty chuffed. As usual there are a few new/polished features which I don't care about (face unlock, dictating texts, most of the camera improvements since I'm not that much into photo taking) and some stuff which they are missing. The big one being facebook. They said that any social network can use their API so hopefully that means some tighter integration at OS level, but time will tell. They are trying to push g+ obviously and I like it way more than fb, especially when it comes to mobile, but at the end of the day I'll always end up where most of my non-geek friends are. One other trend which has being gaining traction is the proliferation of profile photos, qhich can be very nice and make the UI come to life. But in my experience, quite often people won't have profile pics, because they haven't posted one or the contact exists just as a gmail address/phone number and isn't linked to any social network. That and most people put profile pics which are rubbish thumbnails that will look like a turd once you blow them up on a 4.3-4.65 screen which will suddenly look much less cool.
Anyway. These are VERY early impressions and are mostly positive. I hope there won't be many problems with porting this to the HD2. And if there are then I guess 2-2.5 years of valiant service is not a bad run.

We should be getting it. http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/19/google-confirms-nexus-s-will-get-ice-cream-sandwich-for-real/
Theoretically it should run on any Android 2.3 device.

Direct from Engadget :-
<We've just heard straight from Google's Gabe Cohen that the Nexus S will definitely be getting ICS. In fact, both he and Matias Duarte think most Gingerbread devices will see an upgrade, saying: Currently in the process for releasing Ice Cream Sandwich for Nexus S. Theoretically should work for any 2.3 device.>
So it should be fine

Hell Yes!! I guess there is still a difference between "run" and "run well" - iOS4 on iPhone 3G anyone? - but I'm really looking forward to it. This is awesome news. If they are rolling out ICS to the Nexus S then we might even see a usable ROM before the Galaxy Nexus hits retail.

Honestly, I don't think Google would release an OS that would run only on dual core devices, while they are still far from being top sellers. There are way more single-core devices out there...
Beside, while dual core devices are obviously faster (I have a Tab 10.1 myself)...that's pretty much it ! Games will run smoother but not the OS itself. You don't feel the dual core is fully used.
I guess that things will get trickier for our HD2 at the end of 2012 when dual core will be more implemented.
So sit back and wait for AOSP/CM9.

Looks like the SDK and the G-Nex system dump are both out...
Hope we see a ROM for the HD2 soon!

Nil3E said:
With Android 4.0 release today. Im raising the question. Is there any future and posibility of Droid 4.0 on HTC HD2 - Is Hardware of HD2 even capable of handle this system ?
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ICS has no new hardware requirements so doesnt matter how old the device is, if it was capable to run gingerbread than your good for ICS
Carriers won’t have to use nasty schemes to make people buy a new phone either, i wonder what their marketing trick for devices with ICS will be.
That Google wouldnt release an OS that would run only on dual core devices is also true, and dual core support doesnt even mean your device will run better, it just handles multitasking better.
(My old 3.2ghz dual core laptop runs faster than my new 2.0ghz quad core )

Just see and hope

hope i can try!

hope that cooming soon, how about NexusHD2-Ice Cream Sandwich rom by tytung ^^ lol

i hope ics can be ported for our hd2

The only thing that most certainly will not work is the face unlock feature. Although even then they might make it use the back camera .
Add to that the 1080p recording and those are the only things I don't see ever working on our beloved hd2.
Fortunately, it's android 4.0 and they still didn't iron out our phone. ICS will be possible on hd2. Hope it sees even 5.0 and onwards.

youtube.com/watch?v=5QHhFR-puEo Android 4.0 in HD2? YEAA

braspl said:
youtube.com/watch?v=5QHhFR-puEo Android 4.0 in HD2? YEAA
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE93OdYnkrA (tutorial on how to do it?)

nemuro said:
The only thing that most certainly will not work is the face unlock feature. Although even then they might make it use the back camera .
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I'm fairly sure CM9 will come up with a back camera work around...

I have to admit i was wondering myself if ICS would run on our HD2 after hearing that the coding in ICS was built for dual core.. but the devs here and the hd2 can conquer anything.. even android Jello, kitkat, licorise, and muffin lol jk

ics on atrix

all i want to know when moto atrix is getting ics.i also have sgs captivate and it is running on ics port and woking very well.so i also want to have ics on this phone also.pls do it quickly

sx4 said:
all i want to know when moto atrix is getting ics.i also have sgs captivate and it is running on ics port and woking very well.so i also want to have ics on this phone also.pls do it quickly
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Seriously, SEARCH!! there's already too many threads about this. And writing another thread isn't gunna help it get here faster. We need another tegra device to get it first. You'd know this if you SEARCHED!!!!
Sent from my MB860 using XDA App

sx4 said:
all i want to know when moto atrix is getting ics.i also have sgs captivate and it is running on ics port and woking very well.so i also want to have ics on this phone also.pls do it quickly
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This sense of entitlement is why devs are leaving XDA.
There is currently no ICS port. The group working on CM7 will be doing a version for CM9 but as with any version of CM, no etas. Next time use search. If you want ICS badly, you already have it on your captivate.

sx4 said:
all i want to know when moto atrix is getting ics.i also have sgs captivate and it is running on ics port and woking very well.so i also want to have ics on this phone also.pls do it quickly
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If you want it so bad, port it hisself instead of giving orders in a somewhat polite way.
Sent from my MB860 using XDA App

sx4 said:
all i want to know when moto atrix is getting ics.i also have sgs captivate and it is running on ics port and woking very well.so i also want to have ics on this phone also.pls do it quickly
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Pls do it quickly? Every dev in here is probably cursing your phone and hoping it breaks right before ics leaks. Might want to take your a la carts attitude to the windows phone forums.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using xda premium

[opinion]you will never see an official port for ICS from the Atrix, Atrix 2, or any device using the webtop.[/opinion]
In addition, the Atrix 4G has the FP scanner. These two features are going to kill any official support from Motorola. Why?
They are LAZY! The webtop was cobbled together in the first place. This is why the 'the optimus 2x is getting ICS' argument doesn't work in the case of the Atrix. Sure this will leave a bad taste in consumers' mouths, for maybe two seconds until they come out with something new and shiny. Seems people are willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for hardware that isn't even an upgrade, so why bother putting effort into updating software when it isn't profitable?
Its also worth noting that there are some parts of the world where GB isn't even an official release yet! Once they roll out GB in all regions, they will bury support for this phone six feet under, despite the customer objections.
Besides, our clandestine group of developers for the Atrix have pushed out better software than the official Moto devs ever could. You'll see a CM9 port before you even hear an utterance from Motorola to support the Atrix.

SirFork said:
you will never see an official port for ICS from the Atrix, Atrix 2, or any device using the webtop.
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Source please!

CaelanT said:
Source please!
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Aside from Motorola's track record, I have none. Hence, the several paragraphs explaining my reasoning. The lack of correspondence from Motorola (all I have gotten from them are canned almost political-sounding statements) and the present state of affairs for Atrix support in addition to the points I made previously are why I am extremely skeptical of ICS ever coming to the Atrix officially.
Of course I hope that I will eat my own words some day, like an ice cream sandwich
Edited my previous post to reflect as an opinion article not as fact.

SirFork said:
Aside from Motorola's track record, I have none. Hence, the several paragraphs explaining my reasoning. The lack of correspondence from Motorola (all I have gotten from them are canned almost political-sounding statements) and the present state of affairs for Atrix support in addition to the points I made previously are why I am extremely skeptical of ICS ever coming to the Atrix officially.
Of course I hope that I will eat my own words some day, like an ice cream sandwich
Edited my previous post to reflect as an opinion article not as fact.
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Including the fact that since July, Motorola has released or is about to release the Droid 3, Bionic, RAZR, Droid 4, RAZRMAX, Photon 4G, Triumph, and Atrix 2. Throw on the Cliq 2, Atrix, and Droid X2 from earlier in the year.

im running ics on my atrix right now CM9, enginerring build, lots of things broken, def not for public and will not be made available for public for a while. so DO NOT ASK FOR IT. btw all credit to turl and atrix-dev-team. my point is, never say never because its already a fact.

samcripp said:
im running ics on my atrix right now CM9, enginerring build, lots of things broken, def not for public and will not be made available for public for a while. so DO NOT ASK FOR IT. btw all credit to turl and atrix-dev-team. my point is, never say never because its already a fact.
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Great news! I'm sure none of us will be stupid enough to ask for ETA's!
I'm assuming no HW Acceleration and the good stuff. Have you heard about Nvidia's plans to release ICS drivers and binaries for their Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 line early next year?

coolnow said:
Great news! I'm sure none of us will be stupid enough to ask for ETA's!
I'm assuming no HW Acceleration and the good stuff. Have you heard about Nvidia's plans to release ICS drivers and binaries for their Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 line early next year?
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actually is really smooth, the issues are on other things, im not gonna go into detail, but is def very nice and smooth

There you go! Now all ICS on Atrix speculation can be laid to rest!

samcripp said:
actually is really smooth, the issues are on other things, im not gonna go into detail, but is def very nice and smooth
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So you saying hw accel or no hw accel?
sent from a galaxy far far away.

maybe idk, just got it today, sure feels hw accelerated, any ways, no more questions

samcripp said:
maybe idk, just got it today, sure feels hw accelerated, any ways, no more questions
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Thank you for the input mate. I'd get ready to go into hiding if i was you I can just rest easy now
As always, thank you and the Atrix Dev Team, and all the other devs who work on this phone, thank you, thank you, thank you so very much!

;19986019 said:
So you saying hw accel or no hw accel?
sent from a galaxy far far away.
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How about some Android graphics true facts?
• Android has always used some hardware accelerated drawing. Since before 1.0 all window compositing to the display has been done with hardware.
• This means that many of the animations you see have always been hardware accelerated: menus being shown, sliding the notification shade, transitions between activities, pop-ups and dialogs showing and hiding, etc.
• Android did historically use software to render the contents of each window. For example in a UI like there are four windows: the status bar, the wallpaper, the launcher on top of the wallpaper, and the menu. If one of the windows updates its contents, such as highlighting a menu item, then (prior to 3.0) software is used to draw the new contents of that window; however none of the other windows are redrawn at all, and the re-composition of the windows is done in hardware. Likewise, any movement of the windows such as the menu going up and down is all hardware rendering.
• Looking at drawing inside of a window, you don’t necessarily need to do this in hardware to achieve full 60fps rendering. This depends very much on the number of pixels in your display and the speed of your CPU. For example, Nexus S has no trouble doing 60fps rendering of all the normal stuff you see in the Android UI like scrolling lists on its 800x480 screen. The original Droid however struggled with a similar screen resolution.
• "Full" hardware accelerated drawing within a window was added in Android 3.0. The implementation in Android 4.0 is not any more full than in 3.0. Starting with 3.0, if you set the flag in your app saying that hardware accelerated drawing is allowed, then all drawing to the application’s windows will be done with the GPU. The main change in this regard in Android 4.0 is that now apps that are explicitly targeting 4.0 or higher will have acceleration enabled by default rather than having to put " in their manifest. (And the reason this isn’t just turned on for all existing applications is that some types of drawing operations can’t be supported well in hardware and it also impacts the behavior when an application asks to have a part of its UI updated. Forcing hardware accelerated drawing upon existing apps will break a significant number of them, from subtly to significantly.)
• Hardware accelerated drawing is not all full of win. For example on the PVR drivers of devices like the Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus, simply starting to use OpenGL in a process eats about 8MB of RAM. Given that our process overhead is about 2MB, this is pretty huge. That RAM takes away from other things, such as the number of background processes that can be kept running, potentially slowing down things like app switching.
• Because of the overhead of OpenGL, one may very well not want to use it for drawing. For example some of the work we are doing to make Android 4.0 run well on the Nexus S has involved turning off hardware accelerated drawing in parts of the UI so we don’t lose 8MB of RAM in the system process, another 8MB in the phone process, another 8MB in the system UI process, etc. Trust me, you won’t notice -- there is just no benefit on that device in using OpenGL to draw something like the status bar, even with fancy animations going on in there.
• Hardware accelerated drawing is not a magical silver bullet to butter-smooth UI. There are many different efforts that have been going on towards this, such as improved scheduling of foreground vs. background threads in 1.6, rewriting the input system in 2.3, strict mode, concurrent garbage collection, loaders, etc. If you want to achieve 60fps, you have 20 milliseconds to handle each frame. This is not a lot of time. Just touching the flash storage system in the thread that is running the UI can in some cases introduce a delay that puts you out of that timing window, especially if you are writing to storage.
• A recent example of the kinds of interesting things that impact UI smoothness: we noticed that ICS on Nexus S was actually less smooth when scrolling through lists than it was on Gingerbread. It turned out that the reason for this was due to subtle changes in timing, so that sometimes in ICS as the app was retrieving touch events and drawing the screen, it would go to get the next event slightly before it was ready, causing it to visibly miss a frame while tracking the finger even though it was drawing the screen at a solid 60fps.
• When people have historically compared web browser scrolling between Android and iOS, most of the differences they are seeing are not due to hardware accelerated drawing. Originally Android went a different route for its web page rendering and made different compromises: the web page is turned in to a display list, which is continually rendered to the screen, instead of using tiles. This has the benefit that scrolling and zooming never have artifacts of tiles that haven’t yet been drawn. Its downside is that as the graphics on the web page get more complicated to draw the frame rate goes down. As of Android 3.0, the browser now uses tiles, so it can maintain a consistent frame rate as you scroll or zoom, with the negative of having artifacts when newly needed tiles can’t be rendered quickly enough. The tiles themselves are rendered in software, which I believe is the case for iOS as well. (And this tile-based approach could be used prior to 3.0 without hardware accelerated drawing; as mentioned previously, the Nexus S CPU can easily draw the tiles to the window at 60fps.)
• Hardware accleration does not magically make drawing performance problems disappear. There is still a limit to how much the GPU can do. A recent interesting example of this is tablets built with Tegra 2 -- that GPU can touch every pixel of a 1280x800 screen about 2.5 times at 60fps. Now consider the Android 3.0 tablet home screen where you are switching to the all apps list: you need to draw the background (1x all pixels), then the layer of shortcuts and widgets (let’s be nice and say this is .5x all pixels), then the black background of all apps (1x all pixels), and the icons and labels of all apps (.5x all pixels). We’ve already blown our per-pixel budget, and we haven’t even composited the separate windows to the final display yet. To get 60fps animation, Android 3.0 and later use a number of tricks. A big one is that it tries to put all windows into overlays instead of having to copy them to the framebuffer with the GPU. In the case here even with that we are still over-budget, but we have another trick: because the wallpaper on Android is in a separate window, we can make this window larger than the screen to hold the entire bitmap. Now, as you scroll, the movement of the background doesn’t require any drawing, just moving its window... and because this window is in an overlay, it doesn’t even need to be composited to the screen with the GPU.
• As device screen resolution goes up, achieving a 60fps UI is closely related to GPU speed and especially the GPU’s memory bus bandwidth. In fact, if you want to get an idea of the performance of a piece of hardware, always pay close attention to the memory bus bandwidth. There are plenty of times where the CPU (especially with those wonderful NEON instructions) can go a lot faster than the memory bus.
On a side note, the Tegra 2 does not have NEON instructions and only uses single-channel memory, which limits how well GPU acceleration helps with smoothness.

thanks.
sent from a galaxy far far away.

samcripp said:
maybe idk, just got it today, sure feels hw accelerated, any ways, no more questions
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Sure would love to see a screenshot or 10. Have seen absolutely zero anywhere else about this happening.
Not saying "prove it" or anything, mind you! Just curious (as is everyone else here).

It's great to know that ATrix CM9 is in the oven. I personally have no doubt that ATRIX will get ICS officially.