Alright, so I finally had the chance to spend a good 20 minutes with an S3 running Jelly Bean.
You guys win, the interface is much smoother. No doubt about it. The general UI navigation does indeed deliver a smooth 60 fps refresh rate and the general feeling of using the device is much snappier than with ICS. It seems like an excellent phone, no doubt about it, and with Jelly Bean the experience is excellent.
I do have a question, however, regarding the way the default Android web browser handles page rendering.
So I was testing speed on my iPhone 5 vs the S3 opening web pages. Let's say I open the desktop version of Engadget on both phones. Neither one exhibits checker board patterns when scrolling quickly, which is awesome, and the Android zooming performance has been cleaned up a lot (still not as smooth as iPhone, but damn close).
The thing that struck with with nearly every page, however, was how SMALL the text is on Android when viewing desktop sites. This was an issue with older Android phones and I see this is still happening here. Is there a way to solve this? I messed around in the configuration options with different text and zoom options all of which had an effect on the text size but none of it brought it to the iPhone levels.
The reason this is an issue is simply that, on iPhone, you can zoom all the way out of a desktop web site and the text, while small, is just large enough to comfortably and clearly read. On the S3, however, text was a bit smaller and almost impossible to comfortably read at full page view. The Pentile display made it worse, I thought.
So as I was wrong about JB, I'm wondering if anyone can clarify this issue for me. Is there a way to make it so standard webpages display text at a larger (but still small) size that is easy enough to read?
I don't have an Android screen to show this, but the text on this page seemed almost 50% smaller compared to this and was difficult to read despite the larger screen. The font was just smaller.