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Hi all,
I'm wonsering if true multitasking is possible...
I have been using the sgs2 for a few days now.and its.my first android.phone.
Im very happy with it but jus missing one feature...
When Im watching video in a browser or app Id like to be able to quickly do something else while the.audio keeps.playing.
Is this possible?
I do know that some apps have this featur (audio players etc.)
But id like to do this with the browser or cnn app
Greetings, dutchy
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I'm not sure if it would be possible, although the video is kept in memory, it has to close in order to open another app, I don't think you could have audio playing in background during a different application. My thought, though I'm still kinda n00b-ish with Android myself.
@SgtDutchyNL
It's possible for sure, but browsers intentionally pauses/stops playback when they're "minimized", because this is what most people want in most cases. I don't know any browser app which does run flash content in the background.
Shame there isnt an option for it, maybe its possible by editing some code?
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Coming from a Palm Pre (WebOS) I really hate multi-tasking on Android devices, switching from app to app sometimes doesn't even let you carry on where you started.
Bawezy said:
Coming from a Palm Pre (WebOS) I really hate multi-tasking on Android devices, switching from app to app sometimes doesn't even let you carry on where you started.
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Really, I've never had an issue switching between browser, sms, email, contacts and maps, all whilst listening to music.
As for video in the browser, Flash has been built to only run whilst in focus to stop the battery from draining when animation is running in a tab in the background.
To help the issue of multitasking, try installing wavelauncher on market. it is exactly like the wave launcher in webos. but it still wont fix the fact that android will close your program in the background when it needs more memory (which is why you have to restart from scratch when you "alt-tab" around)
I have a Palm Pixi Plus which I use for work email. No doubt WebOS is amazing when it comes to multi tasking, their ecosystem(h/w and s/w) should mature but I doubt if it can reach anywhere near Android. For that matter I doubt if M$ or RIM or Intel can ever achieve this.
I've been using Android for the past 2+ yrs. I must admit Android's muti tasking is rubbish. All we need is a simple button X (similar to Windows PC) to close any damn app than closing/killing in a different way in each app/phone. Its confusing at times. Good thing is Galaxy S II is a very good phone. A complete package must say..
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You guys misunderstood, i dont hate android's multitasking, in my opinion it doesnt match that of webOS as that was the mobile os where true multitasking was derived from. As gd as the android operating system is, Galaxy s2 is making me like android more.
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I've also noticed the problem when using sites like mega upload where you have to wait a certain amount of time before downoading a file. If the counter is on 30 seconds, I think I have time to check an e-mail or a few tweets while waiting, so I do that and when I come back to the browser the counter is still at 30 seconds...
It's usually not a big deal but I find it amusing that android fanboys made fun of iOS because it doesn't have true multitasking, although from what I can see android just saves the state of your apps and restores it when you go back to the app... it's OK in most situation but it's hardly multitasking.
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BlueScreenJunky said:
I've also noticed the problem when using sites like mega upload where you have to wait a certain amount of time before downoading a file. If the counter is on 30 seconds, I think I have time to check an e-mail or a few tweets while waiting, so I do that and when I come back to the browser the counter is still at 30 seconds...
It's usually not a big deal but I find it amusing that android fanboys made fun of iOS because it doesn't have true multitasking, although from what I can see android just saves the state of your apps and restores it when you go back to the app... it's OK in most situation but it's hardly multitasking.
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Most sites like that do this on the desktop now to keep your focus on their ads. Not sure if megaupload does but a lot do so i could just be this.
mark2222 said:
Most sites like that do this on the desktop now to keep your focus on their ads. Not sure if megaupload does but a lot do so i could just be this.
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Yes, this happens if you try the same on your computer too.
Huh ? Never happened to me on the computer but I'll check (it would make sense and seems doable w/ javascript), it could be that indeed.
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BlueScreenJunky said:
It's usually not a big deal but I find it amusing that android fanboys made fun of iOS because it doesn't have true multitasking, although from what I can see android just saves the state of your apps and restores it when you go back to the app...
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Click to collapse
No, Android has true multitasking, but that doesn't mean every app should or have to use it, does it? If I browse through internet, I'm on a site with dynamic Flash/Javascript content and I exit browser then I want it to freeze any dynamic content to minimize power consumption. This is exactly what most of people want in most situations and this is why you have problems with Megaupload. It's possible to create a browser which will run Megaupload counter in the background, but no one has created one so far, because it wouldn't be that good.
You all should understand this isn't a technical issue, it's a design concern. If you switch/exit an app then OS (no matter: mobile or desktop one) has to do one of the following:
run it normally in the background
pause it
close it
give user a choice
Each of above has its pros and cons. Desktop OSes use first option, because they don't care about power and RAM consumption. They also use last option, because on a big screen, with mouse and full keyboard there is no problem to add such controls.
But using same solution on a phone would be a disaster, I think. Older mobile OSes use third option: they close app after exiting it, they don't have MT at all. iOS is somewhere between pause and close. Android is between pause and run: it pauses apps by default, but gives them a possibility to run in the background if they want. And this is a big difference between iOS and Android. On the iOS app can't run in the background even if both its developer and user want that. On the Android it depends fully on a developer choice.
What I want to say is: there is no single, perfect solution to this problem. If clicking "home" button would not pause an app by default then OS would be a piece of **** to me. Even if it would give me a possibility to easily pause/close an app - still POS. Pause should be a default action to make OS easy to use, so I think Android design is really good. One thing which could be done is to give more control to user. E.g. an option to resume/not pause an app on demand, so it will run similarly to foreground mode.
And how does work this awesome MT of webos (I don't really know)? Please, don't say it runs apps in the background by default - if so then sorry, but as I said it's a POS to me.
Brut.all said:
And how does work this awesome MT of webos (I don't really know)? Please, don't say it runs apps in the background by default - if so then sorry, but as I said it's a POS to me.
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Multitasking on a WebOS, for those who haven't yet seen it: http://youtu.be/wZht-a0VlD8
Brut.all said:
No, Android has true multitasking, but that doesn't mean every app should or have to use it, does it? If I browse through internet, I'm on a site with dynamic Flash/Javascript content and I exit browser then I want it to freeze any dynamic content to minimize power consumption. This is exactly what most of people want in most situations and this is why you have problems with Megaupload. It's possible to create a browser which will run Megaupload counter in the background, but no one has created one so far, because it wouldn't be that good.
You all should understand this isn't a technical issue, it's a design concern. If you switch/exit an app then OS (no matter: mobile or desktop one) has to do one of the following:
run it normally in the background
pause it
close it
give user a choice
Each of above has its pros and cons. Desktop OSes use first option, because they don't care about power and RAM consumption. They also use last option, because on a big screen, with mouse and full keyboard there is no problem to add such controls.
But using same solution on a phone would be a disaster, I think. Older mobile OSes use third option: they close app after exiting it, they don't have MT at all. iOS is somewhere between pause and close. Android is between pause and run: it pauses apps by default, but gives them a possibility to run in the background if they want. And this is a big difference between iOS and Android. On the iOS app can't run in the background even if both its developer and user want that. On the Android it depends fully on a developer choice.
What I want to say is: there is no single, perfect solution to this problem. If clicking "home" button would not pause an app by default then OS would be a piece of **** to me. Even if it would give me a possibility to easily pause/close an app - still POS. Pause should be a default action to make OS easy to use, so I think Android design is really good. One thing which could be done is to give more control to user. E.g. an option to resume/not pause an app on demand, so it will run similarly to foreground mode.
And how does work this awesome MT of webos (I don't really know)? Please, don't say it runs apps in the background by default - if so then sorry, but as I said it's a POS to me.
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Click to collapse
Thanx for this very informative post.
And indeed I think the best solution would be for each app to have a default behavior as it is right now, but let the user force the app to keep running at all times if they need to for some reason and don't care about the performance hit.
Ty for all the info, but still, I just want the option to run some app normally in the background, its annoying when youre watching a movie and quickly need to check mail, i like having it playing on
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Intresting to me that good old WM 6.5 was true multitasking and could run for the best part of a week in standby Android in all it's forms, with background program managment, can barely do a couple of days !
Interesting in the video that I didn't see any evidence of true multitasking
Like some1 mentioned already, android is a multiple task/thread OS. So you can pretty much do anything. It's down to the developer. If you wanted music/vid to play in the background when not active in foreground tis easy to extend your application to have a service that constantly runs, and the app (UI) is just the controller. A good example of multitasking is seeing 2 things update where both are either critical data or processor intense. An example being your widgets update while live wallpaper is doing something. So to me, there is either multitasking or not, not really true multitasking. I think from the video of webOs I would call it a task/app/thread visual controller, and not a few words like "true multitasking".
Just my brain dumb on the issue
I want to make a (more recent) comparison of web browsers available to us on the ASUS TF101 and TF201 tablets, something that is useful. In my experience we don't have all that many threads that are Really Good on this subject, that don't get bogged down with noise and opinion drowning out the signal after a while.
The browsers, web sites, and procedures I will use for testing are being collected HERE as they are written.
I am open to suggestions of things to test as long as they don't cost me $$$, are legit, and hopefully widely used by communities of people in general. If it has issues with the stock browser in HC/ICS/GB/Froyo in fast/simple usage, like crashy crashy! Then I am more likely to test a suggestion.
Note for mods: this is cross posted in the forum for both tablets.
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On my free time, I downloaded:
- Opera Mobile
- Maxthon
- Dolphin
- Firefox
- Firefox Aurora
I used the PeaceKeeper browser benchmark by FutureMark and tested each one.
The top scoring ones were all very similar: Maxthon, Dolphin, and Stock.
The middle ground browser was Opera.
The really low scores were Firefox and Firefox Aurora.
Maxthon, Dolphin, support more codecs and look pretty Chrome-like.
Is miren browser working for the prime?
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Nevermind I see it.
Interesting thread..liking forward to the results. Pretty extensive list you have of browsers. I have 5 of them out the list. MAXTHALON, OPERA MOBILE, ICS+, BOAT BROWSER, DOLPHin HD, and stock. The best performing for me are opera mobile, stock, n boat browser. SOMETHING happened after ICS update that drastically improved stock browser performance. It use to be my worst performer. BOAT browser is great also n runs flash very well. Just have to get used to its setup. OPERA mobile of course is always fast n only drawback is flash not working right on Prime version of Opera Mobile.
I've settled on Boat Browser. I've not experienced the lockups or pages not loading that all the other browsers that I've tried. It does take a while to get used to the format but if means no lockups I'll keep using it.
OK, I just ran almost all of the ones you listed through the peacekeeper browser test. The results are below. Each browser was only run 1 time and if its not listed it means the browser was not capable of giving me a score
Xscope - 378
Stock Browser - 361
Maxthon - 343
Boat - 369
ICS browser+ - 369
Opera Mobile - 274
Ninesky - 361
Angel - 375
Sleipner - 376
Dolphin Pad - 376
Firefox - 273
These are not in any particular order and I also only tested one opera and one dolphin, not all of them. Hope this gets the thread started.
Was also going to bench all with browsermark but the stock browser wouldn't get through it without crashing.
Higher score is better?
I've been using BOAT since I heard about it here.
Also, does everyone set their agent preference to desktop?
yes higher is better. Give xscope a try and you will see. I like setting my agent to iPad for some reason things just look good and flash still works unlike on iPad
Maybe we can merge these two together, and keep one good resourceful browser thread. Also, does this forum support multiple people being able to edit a post?
Not that I know of but I've been using the gdocs document for test procedures and a spreadsheet on gdocs for results, and those do support that. I planned ahead, else it'd all be a plain text file I could feed into perl lol.
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OPERA MOBILE just had a huge update today, finally. Supposedly fixes flash in Hc and ICS and compatibility issues with ICS. Going to test it out.
---------- Post added at 09:59 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:47 AM ----------
Checked it out, seems they completely removed flash from opera mobile. Now there is no option for flash. Go to websites n it'll tell you flash or Java not installed or something similar.
Took another look at changelog and it says its known Flash has issues on latest version of ICS 4.0.3. Seems like we took a step backwards on opera now..lmao. hopefully next update will add 4.0.3 support SMH
timgt said:
yes higher is better. Give xscope a try and you will see. I like setting my agent to iPad for some reason things just look good and flash still works unlike on iPad
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I never do this, because im sick of companies thinking ipad is the only tablet. I set mine to Android, and happily deal with anything that comes with doing that.
I grabbed X-Scope Pro free on Amazon a few months ago waiting for the chance to use on a tablet and so far I love it. I have been having issues with the stock browser closing randomly while surfing and that hasn't happened once in X-Scope. So far, so good.
They removed the plugins setting from OM as well. Maybe b/c it's really just flash in practice, and adobe isn't making a plugin for Android 9 someday. Or maybe it only applies to Android 4.0.3 devices --- looking at the what's new.
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A good site to test, and I didn't see on your chart, is www.espn3.com. That is their streaming video site and plays live and recorded sporting events. It is super heavy on Flash Video.
I watch it all the time, but it will not load and play in Opera (which we all know has problems with Flash).
I got an alert that Firefox has released a big update. I havent tested the old FF, but i might give it a shot, i liked the screeny they showed in the news article!
By the way guys, it would probably help to distinguish between browsers that are essentially just overlays on the stock browser, using the same HTML rendering engine, versus browsers that use their own HTML renderer.
Browsers like Dolphin, Boat Browser, and ICS Browser have roughly the same performance as the stock browser because they are all using a variation of the Webkit rendering enginer, whereas Opera and Firefox are using their own.
My spreadsheet always notes the rendering engine as possible, and assumes stock when no detail otherwise is found.
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Hey
I know this is a long shot but is their anyway to get the safari(iphone) browser on an android phone. Barring that emulate it somehow I am trying to test mobile phone web pages across all platforms.
Thanks
I don't think it is possible to actually port iOS app to Android without source code(which obviously is N/A). But there is an app called Boat Browser, which looks pretty much like Safari.
Safari uses webkit and so does the Android browser so they should render very similar. Its similar to Chrome vs Safari on the desktop, they usually render the same.
Thanks
Thanks for the reply's I have done a bit of testing they render mostly the same but every now and then something odd happens. They really should release emulators for development purposes.
So don't take this as a complaint thread, I love my Prime! I was searching on the forums for why there is a lag with pdfs. I am only talking about that 1 or 2 second lag while scrolling though a pdf. In no way does it make the tablet unusable for reading pdfs. I was just wondering what do you think is stopping it from being like a computer, I can scroll though a pdf on my computer w/o ever seeing it render. Is it a processor, ram, programming, or storage read time problem?
Processor, I dunno too much about this area. I feel it should be fine.
Ram, maybe the computer is loading the pdf in ram and with the prime w/ only a gig is a little under? If that was true then computers back in the xp days would have lagged.
Programming, far far outside my knowledge. One of the reasons for the post, but you would think that someone would have done this by now.
storage, should be g2g too. I would guess....
I have tried ezpdf (love it but some of my pdfs do not have a font embeded and the rendering is ok, but others do it better), Adobe (current winner for me), Foxit (very nice), apv pdf viewer (was unuseable due to speed and render issues), Areader, Quickoffice, and Documentstogo. I have not tried Repligo but i hear good things.
Searching I read a lot about people having problems with pdfs, or a dicussion on which pdf reader to use, most choose ezpdf, adobe, or foxit. I just want to know whats holding it back from being a completely smooth experience.
Also I have never looked at a pdf less than 20meg most pdfs I read are in the 80-120meg range. Text with graphics.
Thanks for reading!
Repligo is a lot better (the best I've tried so far on Android) but still not as good as reading it on the iPad with iBooks. In my opinion, it's just the apps aren't optimised for the transformer prime hardware. Repligo is getting close to iPad iBooks (looks the same too LOL) but still not as smooth. I would to see someone release a pdf reader that is as smooth as Google's very old Play Books app or one that is as smooth and same animation as the ICS App Drawer (That would be amazing and would pay up to $10 to get something like that).
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EDIT: Maybe we should open a bounty thread for a tegra3 optimised pdf reader? LOL
Just went and tried it, suffers from the render issues with fonts not being embedded. That's a deal breaker for me, try adobe read and let me know what you think. I just don't like the default fond it renders with.
I feel it was just as fast as adobe for ezpdf.
Thanks for the response!
*EDIT
Also tried the pdfs on my wife's ipad, the experience is a little smoother; just a little but noticeable.
For a living, I pretty much have to read PDF research papers all the time. Unfortunately, when I had the TFP, the PDF-reading, annotating, and research paper/organizing/citation experience was sub-par.
It will only get better over time as more Android tablet optimized apps come out.
But it beats me as to why PDF scrolling and zooming was never really that smooth.
Trying going to developer options in your android settings and force GPU rendering and turn both animations off see if that helps....
But the bottle neck is its using the CPU or ninja core to render it to save power
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Ok, just tried:
Forcing gpu render : on
* animation: off
* transition : 1
Forcing gpu render: on
* animation: 1
* transition: off
Forcing gpu render: on
* animation: off
* transition: off
Forcing gpu render: off
* animation: off
* transition: off
No real diffrence, side note I did root my prime (did it for adbock, host file) and saw the over clock app, easy over clock app. I am assume we can link threads that are already inside the forum, if not let me know and I will remove it. The 1.6 oc is nice, but still not a solve.
@tbns what did you end up using if you don't mind me asking.
I just use Mantano, it works perfect for reading PDFs. There is no page rendering(although, I read relatively small PDFs) and it allows me to scale the PDF to fit the screen. Best of all, it stays scaled after I flip the page. I have never used it to make notes within the PDF, but I believe there is a function for it.
iJoey said:
I just use Mantano, it works perfect for reading PDFs. There is no page rendering(although, I read relatively small PDFs) and it allows me to scale the PDF to fit the screen.
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Thanks, I just tried Mantano and it seems great -- by far the fastest PDF reader I've tried. I wouldn't say there is no rendering though -- I find if I zoom in and scroll around within a page, there is still a split-second delay before text becomes clear. It is not a problem at all, and infinitely better than the other solutions I've tried. If you just flip between pages instead of zooming around within a page, the text instantly appears crystal clear.
Having moved from an iPad to a TP I struggled for a while to find an app that could display PDFs without a lag. The best one, oddly, that I've find so far is the comic viewer Perfect Viewer with the PDF plug-in installed!
Pretty great on this high res tablet, smooth too. Trial and full version available
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appestry.split_browser_trial
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Just tried it and it's great. Thanks for the tip.
3473 said:
Pretty great on this high res tablet, smooth too. Trial and full version available
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I use Chrome as my main browser because of it's bookmark support (sync my pc bookmarks) and device intergration, I can view all my tabs on any of my PC, Tablet, Laptop or Phone...
I love the split screen just wish it was on Chrome :'(
EDIT, also try:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.mmasashi.android.dualscreenbrowser
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mu.dualweb
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bora.browserdual
The Split browser is ideal for the large high resolution Nexus 10 screen as it allows two very good quality active screens running at once which are large enough to see without needing to zoom.
The browser is very smooth and works well without any glitches and highlights the advantage of the wide screen format over the more square screen of the ipad.
You can have something active running on one half like a video or music whilst using the other half to surf the web or you can use it to compare two web pages without them
becoming inactive when focus is lost as you switch between them.
This dual active screen is a great addition to web usage on android and makes it similar to windows browsing where you can have multiple active windows.
The browser is very new and lacks some features which will no doubt be added later. However, it can be used as a speciality browser for those times when active dual screen is needed without using windows.