My second intensive user experience with Android

A few days ago I blogged about a few quirks with blueBill Mobile on Android, during my first user experience. Most notably, they were related to recurrent "freezings" especially when operating together with some other applications running in background. Then I had a friend of mine trying the application on his Motorola Droid, and I could see the Android system message about "application not responding" appearing right at the splash screen. The splash screen hides the loading of data in memory from a JSON file and takes a few seconds - while it was really puzzling to see this difference in behaviour with two identical phones (I've never seen the "application not responding" on my own Droid), it made me understand that I was handling background tasks in the wrong way (in spite of the fact I did RTFM, but misunderstood it). Now I fixed the things in the just released 0.10.0, that I tried yesterday on the field spending several hours in the rice fields between Milan and Genoa. Everything worked in a perfectly smooth way: the Motorola navigator running in background and giving audible advices, GPS Logger Pro recording the track in background, blueBill Mobile always responsive and other application brought up quickly (for instance browsing the web for searching information about a bird). I'd say a wonderful, multi-tasking user experience.

Date: May, 23 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici/archive/2010/05/23/my-second-intensive-user-experience-android

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