IPad iOS 5 vs Windows 8 Slate [video] | Hacker News Reader

IPad iOS 5 vs Windows 8 Slate [video]

winrumors.com

40 pointssytelus36 comments

After seeing this video it appeared to me both interfaces are quite bad for first time users. Most HN readers won't have a problem with it, but concepts like multiple desktop-pages are very hard to understand for first time users.

Overall I think iOS is much better for first time users. Take the unlock screen for example. On iOS you see you need to unlock it. On W8 you don't have a clue. After pushing around you might notice you can slide the screen up. It's a strange concept.

But I have to admit W8 is looking very clean, very customizable. I think this will be good competition for the iOS.

The Win8 lockscreen being confusing depends on the context. For example, a first time user buys a Win8 slate there's probably a basic 'This is how to unlock' tip somewhere, I imagine. Also, seeing average users pick up wild Android unlock schemes I think they'd be okay. :P Though, if they suddenly started playing with a friend's slate the exploring of the interface would be interesting to watch.

Android is an interesting point of comparison because the lock screen on the Galaxy S2 is exactly like the Windows 8 lock screen. When I first got the phone, it took me minutes to figure out how to unlock it. I handed it to a couple friends and asked them to figure out how to unlock the phone and they struggled as well.

On the other hand, I feel like somehow the feedback for the Windows 8 version of unlock is a little bit better - it responds to the swipe a little bit quicker. I do fear that it creates a bad starting point for your first experience with the device though - going into it confused isn't a good thing.

A lot of the gestural input in Win8 feels like it relies on blind exploration to discover how to use the device, unless someone teaches you. In a way, that could be a good idea - encouraging the device's owner to explore and play with gestures - but I think the risk of features remaining hidden and undiscovered is pretty significant.

Good points. The chromeless IE interface looks like another example where users will chafe. I can go completely "chromeless" in Chrome for OSX but I never do because seeing open tabs and having immediate access to extension buttons at all times is too important. I imagine less seasoned users will feel the same way about the URL bar and their favorites.

Actually Windows phone lock is screen is very similar to the windows 8 lock screen as well. I didn't see it in the video but the windows phone lock screen jumps up a little bit hinting that it needs to be pulled up to unlock. Very intuitive.

Why bother with a lockscreen at all. Unless you want to password protect it, I see no reason why the device can't just always be logged in. Upon hardware power-on I want it to shoot directly to the web browser or whatever I was doing last.

Because devices will accidentally wake up when in a pocket / bag / etc, and you'd prefer not to feed random touch events to whatever program you're running. Of course sometimes this won't be relevant, and you could do away with the lock screen. E.g. the Eee Transformer requires the usual Honeycomb unlock gesture when it wakes up undocked or in the dock by pressing the power button, but not when it's in laptop mode and is woken up by the lid being opened.

Back in the portable CD player era they had a hardware lock switch to prevent accidental power-on and button presses, and it worked just fine.

I kind of like the "picture password" option. It shows innovation in an area that badly needs some (authentication) and should be easier to remember for many people than a PIN code, I think.

Picture passwords would be harder to write down, but I'm not yet sure whether that's a negative or a positive.

"should be easier to remember for many people than a PIN code"

Until that day you forgot your tablet home and you had to explain your wife where to tap in order to retrieve that document you need. :)

This problem is solved by simply keeping documents on a server somewhere (I hesitate to say 'the cloud', but that's the marketing term for it) instead of only on the device.

IMO You can switch the auth mode if you want to.

It seems like touch is more natural on Apple devices...maybe people are just trained for it by now, but he seemed to have less difficulty with getting the iPad to do what he wants it to do. Many times he had to try his gesture a 2nd or 3rd time on the Windows 8 tablet.

A lot of development time has gone into the gesture recognizers in iOS. My understanding is that they we're not easy to get right, having a lot of subtlety and edge cases, especially when a given view employs several if them and they need to disambiguate between multiple possible gestures.

Win8 will get there in time, and already has at least one that I would like to see iOS shamelessly copy: the ability, when drag-moving an icon, to employ a finger from another hand to swipe from page to page. Awesome!

> the ability, when drag-moving an icon, to employ a finger from another hand to swipe from page to page. Awesome!

OS X does this on laptops and magic trackpad, you can drag and drop icons that way. iOS supports the drag with one finger/nav with another as well--try it with a text selection handle with your left index and scrolling the page with your right. But to your point, home screen icon moving doesn't use that gesture.

I think familiarity has a lot to do with it. He was trying various gestures to get the Win8 tiles to move and select. He mentioned that you should hold down and drag to move a tile, but what I gather from other demos is that a swipe down on the tile selects it and a long swipe down moves it.

i'm really surprised to find myself more impressed with microsoft's metro style than ios. i wish android had gone with something extremely minimalistic like this.

I'm with you there. I'm normally an Apple fanboy, but iOS is looking cluttered and dated beside Metro.

At first I was really impressed with the Metro-style home screen. But as I watched this video, actually, for the first time, having now seen Metro several times, I realized that there was something about it I didn't like: I think it came down to the constant movement on the home screen. It actually reminds me of web banner ads. Now I'm sure that's configurable but I think I understand why that wouldn't be desirable. Of course that said I'm sure that's the kind of thing some people will love.

Live tiles are great; on my Windows Phone 7 I can get a lot of context just by looking at few tiles in the "root" display (time, the next meeting I'm in -- hopefully not many -- email count, etc.)

I used an iPhone for a couple of years, and would hate to go back.

I was surprised how static and dull the iPad looked; just a bunch of dead icons that don't do anything for you. Reminded me a lot of the desktop in Windows 3.1

The other thing to realize is that you don't stay on the home screen for long. You see if there are any inrestesting notifications and then move on to what you want to do.

I'm of a mixed opinion about this. I agree with you somewhat that iOS initially does look cluttered compared to Metro but Metro is also lacking obviousness as others have mentioned in this thread. It's a difficult balance that one deals with in design. I'd like to see if the average user, in particular kids, have any trouble navigating the UI. There is something to be said when even a two year-old can use the iPad.

That said, I could not be more impressed with Metro when it comes to search functionality, contracts and being able to view two apps at once.

> Metro is also lacking obviousness

Many things in iOS are pretty unobvious too. E.g. I didn't know the iPad keyboard could be split like that before I saw this video. It took me a while to figure out how to delete items in a tablecell (swipe horizontally). Most of my friends don't know you can double-tap home, press & hold running app icons to close them. I see no difference in per-app settings in Metro being a swipe right feature than iOS Settings > AppName. And remember, all of these features are for managing the OS. The app themselves can implement any features they want. 3-year-olds don't change brightness, they play Angry Birds.

What you are referring to are essentially shortcuts or an easier way to accomplish a task. You can still operate an iPad without the knowledge of these shortcuts. With Metro, my comments are relating to basic functions of the OS.

I agree with you on settings. I find them confusing on iOS because some have the settings within the app and some have them in the settings app. Metro's way is much better but it's still hidden to the average user unless they know it's there.

E.g. I didn't know the iPad keyboard could be split like that before I saw this video.

You'll have to find another example of non-obviousness in iOS. The split keyboard isn't even in the iOS you've been using, unless you're running a beta release of iOS 5.

I am on iOS5. I knew it was coming too. I even looked through Settings > General to see if there was a way to set the keyboard layout. I didn't think about doing a [press & hold] on the key I use all the time to hide the keyboard.

I listed delete tablecell & close application as two initially non-obvious examples. Two more examples for new users: Refresh for new email/events by dragging down the top rows and making folders on home screen by dragging one app over another. I'm not saying these are bad gestures - they're all very clever and once you know about them, they become second nature. I'm just saying I see no difference between having to learn/figure these out the first time and Metro's new gestures.

The iOS slide-to-unlock is certainly easier but didn't they patent it?* If the most obvious way of unlocking a screen is patented, others have to find either something even more obvious for everyone (not easy) or rely on something less obvious but not patented.

* Found it: http://thenextweb.com/apple/2010/08/17/ios-slide-to-unlock-i...

I have yet to read a negative review of this but then it's coming sometime next year. Anyway, competition is good and MS is usually good at fighting in the trenches for years, so you can never rule them out. .

MS also makes or will make money each time an Android phone is sold

You should see Engadget's preview on it, and also listen ThisIsMyNext's latest podcast. They all complain about how inconsistent and messy it is to get back from one "desktop" mode to the Metro mode. They should've kept them separated as OS's.

Thanks! Just read read Engadget and it's amazing how many people agreed with that. Shows desktops are not going anywhere for a long time. Maybe MS will add a 'module' so it's a full desktop when needed? If you want to do any meaningful work a desktop is a must.

And let's face it, with all their faults Windows works pretty good. It ain't easy to make an OS that works with all printers.....scanners and everywhere in the world. My desktop is 4 years old and works perfectly.

This video might have felt different if they had not chosen that atrocious, noisy background image for the iOS springboard — and had they adjusted the brightness on each device to be more similar.

What bothers me is that it looks distinctly like Win8 wouldn't run very effectively on tablets of smaller screen sizes - even with the size it's at, for those of us who are heavy users I don't think it's even beginning to match iOS's information density - the iOS 5 homescreen should hold a lot more data than, say, the alert icons or the data 'streaming' into the panels - how often does one sit at that screen staring at it anyway?

Wasn't metro started as Windows Phone 7, though? What did they change that would keep it from scaling back down to a smaller screen?

In Windows 8 you can two apps running concurrently, but only at screen size of width of something like 1366. So many tablets won't get his functionality at all.

And multitasking on Win8 seems much worse than WP7, although that's not a scale issue. The WP7 multitasking seems better almost regardless of size.

Wow, that comment thread is like a black hole. I ventured way too close.

I read your comment, then went back to have a look. One day I'll learn...

The video, however, I thought was one of the most level and unbiased comparisons I've ever seen. Didn't go into a lot of depth (probably hard because Win8 is still largely incomplete), but what it did cover it did well.

Yeah, I read a few comments on that thread and was immediately reminded why I prefer Hacker News to most other tech news sites.

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