Samsung TouchWiz UX Review: Honeycomb Gets Skinned
by Jason Inofuentes on August 5, 2011 11:52 AM ESTHailing the Enterprise
Starting with RIM’s PlayBook and followed by HP’s Touchpad, much has been made about tailoring these devices to the enterprise market. Lenovo will be entering this arena with it’s ThinkPad Tablet in the coming weeks; and they have been trumpeting the enterprise features of their offering, mainly device deployment and manageability offered through back-end services, as well as hardware based encryption. As it turns out, Samsung has beaten them to the punch with a product already a few months old. Samsung announced their Open For Business initiative today, a collection of software and hardware services available for the 10.1 that should make the device more appealing to corporations looking to deploy Android tablets into their workforce.
As expected, device manageability is the key feature that will appeal to IT tech, including the ability to remotely wipe and control all possible features of the device using either the Sybase Afaria or Microsoft ActiveSync protocols. Hardware based AES256 encryption is present on the device and, in what Samsung is calling a first, SSL VPN support is being offered. More front facing additions include “blown out” support for Microsoft Exchange’s Contact, Calendar and E-mail services, along with optimized versions of Cisco WebEx and PolyCom Video Conferencing for video collaboration. It’s unclear how many of these features are dependent on this update or whether these were just features that hadn’t actually been announced, but if you’re in charge of IT purchasing and everyone’s banging on your door to get a tablet, this could push the 10.1 over the edge.
Conclusion
Despite their rabid devotion to them, manufacturer's haven't made a lot of friends by offering skinned Android phones. There are only a handful of top tier phones that offer a pure Android experience; and now these layered experiences are arriving on tablets. But where the redundancy and sluggishness inspired by most phone skins are layered atop an otherwise satisfying and lauded user interface, Honeycomb is not nearly so refined as Gingerbread so it's hard to mar the experience just by adding widgets and some new applications.
TouchWiz UX on the 10.1 is a relatively benign experience, it is neither offensive nor supremely satisfying. If properly built out, the MiniApps and resizable widgets framework could add a lot of utility to Samsung's tablet line-up. The enterprise features will help improve Honeycomb's penetration into the burgeoning corporate tablet market. And the media content offered by Samsung's Media Hub is a nice addition, particularly if they begin providing the content across platforms; imagine Media Hub built-in to your latest Samsung TV or BluRay player.
Where TouchWiz UX really gets me going, is in the potential evident from these additions, that developers have yet to realize. Social Hub is good, but wouldn't a resizable widget for TweetDeck be incredible? Tablets are here to stay, whether their utility is fully realized yet or not. And for better or worse, the two biggest tablet OS competitors will be iOS and Android; let's hope that developers start to push through inspiring applications that ensure that Apple doesn't let iOS rest on its laurels, but continue to advance how we compute on the go.
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JasonInofuentes - Friday, August 5, 2011 - link
Love it.Cleanskin - Friday, August 5, 2011 - link
"...now present within the Notification shade, allowing users to manipulate all the devices radios, volume, screen brightness and vibrate functions with just a press. Hardly revolutionary but a good way to bring up some settings that were previously buried in menus."Stock Android 3.1 already has most of these same settings available in the notification shade. Just tap on the system clock and they show up below.
JasonInofuentes - Friday, August 5, 2011 - link
So, yes, this was readily apparent when Samsung's Gavin Kim did a side by side comparison showing both the 3.1 shade and the modified shade. I do like this iteration better, though.SaigonK - Friday, August 5, 2011 - link
I would have been more impressed if Samsung woudl have gotten off their arse and gotten Netflix and Hulu deployed to the device...compared to my Ipad-2 the 10.1 is nice, but it isnt as refined and doesnt provide the media experience that i have become used to with my Ipad-2. No matter of UI enhancement is going to fix a clear lack of decent tablet based apps and a lack of media giants such as hulu and netflix...
vision33r - Sunday, August 7, 2011 - link
For any company to call themselves "enterprise ready.." they need to have a premier support division available 24/7 that any business can call free or charge to handle priority business needs. Microsoft and RIM both got this covered. I have yet to see anybody match up to their offering, not even Apple.As for this review, I got news for all the Android suffering vs iPad comparisons...
You ever look at the typical desktops of most people? It's got icons and shortcuts scattered over it, people don't organize their stuff or use App launchers anymore. They just go for the easiest thing to dump their icons on the desktop.
While Android allows for this too, it is not a clean and smooth experience when you have widgets blocking it and slowing down performance.
That's why Steve Jobs understands this simple reason and kept the iPad as basic and clean. It needs to operate like a book for average person to use it quickly for consumption.
Anytime I pickup WebOS, Playbook, and Honeycomb. It is utterly a huge fail for these companies to try to make things advance and turns to be huge learning curve for people. They don't need fancy widgets or cool multi-tasking app previews, that's for 1% of the population called geeks.
Belard - Monday, August 8, 2011 - link
Yep....By all means, I think WebOS is quite good. Its multi-tasking is easier than iOS 4.x (we'll see how iOS 5 improves when its officially released) - but it has some areas in which its more difficult than it should be.
I'm not happy with Apple's sue-happy mentality... it makes me want to by a lenovo ThinkPad tablet... I'm not happy with Samsung's Android support on their phones - so I'm NOT expecting anything better on their tablets - no matter how great they look.
But I'm not a fan of the 16x9 screens on Android tablets... And HP's Touchpad's hardware feels like the cheap plastic crap that it is. It feels cheap, it feels nasty once the back is covered with finger prints... I'll live with a few scratches on the back of an iPad - which is... ON THE BACK which I don't see - but do feel.
So with all this in mind... I think an iPad3 is more likely in my future than an Android tablet - even thou I hate and avoid using iTunes as much as possible.
fforblack - Monday, August 8, 2011 - link
Personally, I think that the best multitasking implementation is owned by WebOS. I like the cards idea...never really understood the stacks concept till I actually used one(found it a little bit useful actually)....But I didn't like how the touchpad denied us the gesture bar. I thought they would have done something like swipe right or left for next application or something. But whatever. When I saw this wasn't implemented, I got an iPad instead. I think I should have waited till now to make a choice, but whatever...I'm an apple developer, so I got gestures on my 2, and noticed the swipe left to right gesture. It offers to some degree a mini-version of what I wanted in WebOS's gesture area. If they could reduce the unfreezing latencies to about half of what it is now, I feel like gestures would make the iPad the coolest device I've ever seen(especially if you consider that the apps aren't really running in the background). If hp does something about this, the touchpad 2/3 might be my next tablet. Otherwise, I'm sticking with apple...