Android is Cheerios, not sweet eye candy
Software
Imagine the uproar on Slashdot if this story description was posted about an Apple product! But I digress.
According to Liliputing, Intel is bringing the sweet eye candy of Android to x86, which — if all goes well — means it will land on (more) netbooks and tablets soon.
There are certainly many legitimate reasons people could give for running Android, including having access to [some of] the source code and [somewhat] greater freedom over what you can do with the hardware, but its UI is hardly one of them and it certainly isn't "sweet eye candy".
I'd describe the Android UI with the same word the Metacity team uses to describe their window manager: Cheerios. Not terribly attractive or tasty, but it gets the job done and probably won't shatter like an iPhone 4. HTC's Sense UI may be Slightly Frosted Cheerios. Can you get Slightly Frosted Cheerios?
Let's not forget the prototype Andoid devices were originally designed to broadly copy the BlackBerry UI, it was only when Apple breathed new life into the fairly stagnant smartphone market (thank you, Windows Mobile :P) that Android started looking like… an iPhone. Nothing really wrong with that, but when you have so many other compelling features you should promote them instead.
While I’m on my soapbox…
While I'm ragging on Android and on my mobile soapbox thingy, why is it the media consistently gives the platform a free ride but criticises everything Apple does? It's not just old media, sites like Slashdot are so
