The New Face of Fusion on Android Devices

Yesterday, I kicked off a personal lark of mine, i.e. running Fuse, the internal codename we use for the new face of Fusion Apps, on various devices.

The first edition was a couple of Google devices, a Chromebook and a Google TV. Today’s edition is a couple of Android devices, the venerable Motorola Xoom and the Nexus S.

It’s been a while since I’ve used the Xoom, the Granddaddy of Android tablets; it went to Anthony and then to Noel for development purposes and only recently came back to home to me. I have to say, I’m liking it quite a bit. It’s running Ice Cream Sandwich, 4.0.4, a major improvement over the Honeycomb build it had the last time I used it.

ICS handles tablet operations very smoothly, and even though the Xoom is nearly two years old, like 50 in tablet years, it’s very snappy. One nice thing about Android, true multi-tasking, which is great when you’re downloading 700 items into Pocket and feel like doing something else.

Mea culpa, multi-tasking does matter, especially if you’ve been teased by Apple’s bogus version of it.

Anyway, on to Fuse, which ran beautifully on the Xoom, which doesn’t really qualify as a low-powered device. The Xoom rocks an Nvidia Tegra 2 T20, 1 GHz dual-core processor with 1 GB of RAM, making it very capable. The screen is 10.1 inches at a resolution of 1280 x 800.

I also tested Fuse from my GSM Nexus S, which runs Jelly Bean, 4.1.2. Even though Fuse isn’t yet intended for use on a mobile phone, I wanted to see how it performed. The Nexus S sports a 1 GHz single-core ARM Cortex-A8 with only 512 MB of RAM, so it’s definitely slower than the high-end phones you’d buy today.

Fuse ran well enough on the Nexus S, performing well considering the specs of the device.

On to the pics:

You may notice in the pictures that I’m using the Dolphin browser and not the Android stock browser or Chrome for Android. My preference would have been to use Chrome for all these tests, but alas, the environment I’ve been testing does UA sniffing to ensure that user’s browsers are current.

Fun fact, not all Chromes are equal, e.g. the Google TV Chrome version is 15, Chrome for Android is 18.

Anyway, to avoid the UA sniffer on the Google TV, I used the string for Chrome 24. Another fun fact, Chrome on the Google TV has an advanced setting allowing for a custom UA, but Chrome on Android does not. In Chrome for Android, you can choose to request the desktop version from the Settings, but the UA reported is still Chrome 18.

Long story long, Dolphin allows for custom UA strings, which I used to bypass the check.

So, that’s it for this edition. Next, I’m going old school, OG iPad and OG iPhone.

Stay tuned. Oh, and find the comments.