Thursday, February 23, 2012

Waiting for Jelly Bean

Having just acquired a tablet that has Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0.3) I must admit that there a some improvements over Honeycomb but not enough for me to want to keep the tablet, an Asus Prime.

I see that there is now real-time spell-check on some built-in apps and not in others that really need it. Also the consistency of the spell-check is puzzling. For example here in Blogger the spell-check is active on the post title but not here in the post body????
Most importantly there is no spell-check in Polaris Office. If the Android developers what an Office suit to compete with MS Office (which is currently touted to be coming to the iPad) it needs spell-check. I don't understand as the capability is definitely there as it works in all parts of the GMail app. You can even edit your custom dictionary (with the option to add words on the fly and delete them later should you make a mistake). Although there is a "check spelling" button in the Google Blogger compose screen it doesn't seem to do anything. (Okay - I just worked out that spell-check works in HTML edit mode???? - again consistency,  and most users would stay well away from HTML in any case)

I am not sure I will be keeping the Prime as while it is a very good tablet for today I an't help feeling that the next version of Android will pick up some of these points.

The Splashtop Remote Desktop (under the Asus My Cloud app) seems to work well and I can access all my Windows 7 computers and run x86 programs from the Prime (even printing from Word and Excel etc) - all without installing anything on the Prime. The Splashtop Remote software needs to be downloaded and installed on the Windows 7 machine that you want to access remotely, but then you can also use your Touch or iPad to control your PC as well - there is probably an Android app for this as well but I haven't looked)

I am not really interested in the availability of apps, in comparison to the Apple product - I am more interested  in the basic functionality of the tablet. It is getting there but I am not it is there yet.

1 comment:

South Bend said...

I was wondering if anyone had any information about "android polaris office spell check"

It seems that my Android tablet has the spell-check capability but this does not seem to work in Polaris Office. Is there a setting that I am missing?

I am running Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS 4.0)