No, this post is not about the Nexus One; we'll talk about the device later on. First, I'd like to point out which is the best feature I see in Android 2.1. From the beginning, Live Wallpapers has been the feature which got most of the media's coverage, and although some have pointed out my favorite feature, it's time for it to be under the spotlight.
One of the many standards set bythe iPhone, was "multiple home screens", giving you up to 9. Since Android 1.0, we've got 3. Both HTC and Motorola figured out it wasn't enough, and put 7 and 5 respectively in their branches of Android OS. Although it's true that 3 home screens are not enough, there's a detail we've been missing; with three home screens, we're only one swipe away from the "central" or "main" home screen.
Why is this important? Because sometimes we can get lost in all of our home screens, not remembering where's the screen that has the app or the widget we want. In the iPhone, we've got dots underneath the apps for navigation, and both HTC's Sense UI and Motorola's Blur have something similar; but until iPhone OS 3.0 (in which you can search for apps next to the first home screen) there were situations in which we had to swipe up to four times until we got to our desired home screen. This is still an issue because most of us use the main home screen (this being the first home screen in iPhone OS and the central home screen in Android OS flavours) as a reference of where we keep apps and widgets in the other screens, and it's tiring to start swiping away trying to find the home screen we want.
With only three home screens, Android 1.0 did not have to face this issue; with one swipe we were already in our main home screen, but in Android 2.1, we have five, and we have a new solution: shortcuts. As you can see in the video below by MobileBurn, from 3:20 to 3:56, we now have a preview of our home screens, allowing us to visualize all of them, and to jump directly to the one we want.
Details like this make a difference, and it's details like this that have built Apple's status. Yes, I know, the previews look a lot like webOS's cards, and we're all waiting for Apple's move into multi-tasking, but it's something truly refreshing. Since Android 1.0, where Google impressed with the new notifications bar, there hasn't been any step forward like this in the stock Android's user experience, and we should all show off this feature, to push the Android Team into doing more stuff like this, because we like it, because it's useful, and because it makes Android stand out and feel more unique.
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