Touchpad: Likes & dislikes

Here’s a list of some of the things I like and dislike about the Touchpad and webOS.

LIKE

The hardware—from a user’s point of view—pretty closely mimics the iPad, and that’s a good thing.

A feature they call Synergy. (Though I haven’t seen that name appear within webOS itself.) WebOS allows you to enter information for your Google, Microsoft Exchange, Facebook, Skype, Dropbox, AIM, Box.net, Linked In, MobileMe, Photobucket, Snapfish, and Yahoo accounts in one central place. Then the e-mail, contacts, calendars, photo browsing, file browsing, etc. apps will automatically access those accounts, when appropriate. It also gives you the ability to turn each feature on or off for each account. It appears that third parties can extend this system as well.

The “card UI”. When you press the home button, the view zooms out and the current app appears on a “card”. Swiping left and right shows you the cards of other apps that are running. Pushing a card off the top of the screen quits the app. There’s some other details, but that’s the gist of it.

The menus. At the top of the screen, you have three menus: An app menu, a notifications menu, and a system menu.

The app menu is analogous to the menus of a Mac app or a Palm OS app. This is something that iOS lacks, and I think there are pros and cons to each approach. The app menu seems underused in webOS, though.

The notifications were a clear advantage over iOS before iOS 5. The webOS notifications system still seems a bit ahead of the iOS notifications.

The system menu gives you quick access to system features such as Wi-Fi, VPN, Bluetooth, Airplane Mode, Rotation Lock, and Mute. This is something I wish iOS had.

I’m no fan of Adobe Flash. I agree with Apple’s choice not to support Flash on iOS. I did try out one Flash game I like, though. Chat Noir. It worked fine, though it is admittedly a very simple game. I wish I had the time and motivation to finish my Javascript clone.

Rooting. This is the equivalent of jailbreaking on iOS. WebOS, however, doesn’t appear to discourage it. Certainly not to the extent Apple does. I understand why Apple discourages it. Still, it is a lot of fun for someone like me to be able to get into the lower levels of the system. It allows us to do things some useful and fun things.

Just type. This is the webOS equivalent of iOS’s Spotlight. Though it seems to promise to be something of a keyboard-driven Siri. Truth is, I haven’t used it much, and when I have, I haven’t found it any better than Spotlight. I do like its prominent position in the system, though.

DISLIKE

WebOS doesn’t have support of auto-configured proxies. This means that when I connect to the wi-fi at my office, I can’t get to anything on the Internet. In fact, it doesn’t support proxies either. Even when I tried to configure a static proxy through the Linux command shell (after rooting it)—following instructions others had gotten to work—I couldn’t get it to work.

Tapping and interaction in general doesn’t feel as direct as on the iPad. In fact, whenever you tap, the system gives feedback through a ripple effect. This is needed because the response of apps to taps lags. Worse, the ripple really makes you notice the amount of error in tapping that you don’t notice on iOS.

The keyboard can’t keep up with fast typing.

I could pair the Touchpad with my Bluetooth keyboard, but I couldn’t change the layout to Dvorak.

Remember when web browsers on phones and game systems and such felt so clunky? That’s how the webOS web browser feels. Strange for an OS that is built so much on web technologies that they named it “webOS”.

While the card UI is cool, it means that I have to manage cards. I have to make sure that I explicitly push cards off the screen to dismiss them. If I don’t, I’ll hit the limit—which happened sooner than I expected—and the system will tell me that I have to go toss some cards before I can do what I’m trying to do.

The Kindle app doesn’t work. I just get a blank page. It’s labelled beta, but this is bad even for a beta. Sure, that might be 100% Amazon’s fault, but I’m listing things I dislike about the Touchpad no matter whose fault it may be.

The Facebook app has issues too. I can’t post comments, and it doesn’t even give me an error message to know that it failed.

I can only get video on a Skype call (in the built-in Phone & Video Calls app) if I initiate the call.

Quickoffice pales in comparison to iWork. It is free, though. When I opened a document I created in it on my Mac, the formatting was badly messed up.

I couldn’t figure out how to rename the file I created with Quickoffice.

Copy, paste, and text selection is frustrating. It took many tries to do a “select all”, and I’m not at all confident that I could repeat the steps that did it.

In Quickoffice, I had to save the file manually like on pre-Lion Macs. It seems strange to me that the successor of Palm OS would work that way.

When I first got the Touchpad, it didn’t come with any apps to use with its camera. Well, the Phone & Video Calls app uses it, but nothing to just take a picture. This was remedied in a system update, though.

THE END

I could certainly go on, but I hope that gives some feel of my experience with the Touchpad. As I’ve said before, I find it very frustrating because there are many things to like, but too much gets in the way.