Droid Sans was, by Google's own admission, designed for low-resolution screens. It's like Chicago on the classic Mac OS. Looks good on low-res screens but looks cheap on high-res ones.
It's interesting that you mention Chicago; my first impression of Roboto on a 96dpi desktop display is that it looks an awful lot like Geneva (or at least, the TrueType version of Geneva, as interpreted by a modern anti-aliasing font-rasteriser).
Using very dissimilar fonts when Helvetica or Arial was specified (by the web designer) changes the feel of many webpages completely.
When I played with a TouchPad and loaded up my own site, my reaction was immediately, “Whoah!” It had suddenly become… playful, and had a whole different vibe than normal.
In this sense, Robotica is “better” in that it is more similar to typical web page body text fonts, and more true to the page creator's intents.
And yet, the DIN-esque aspects of it will have the same problem: Lending qualities to text that the text wasn’t meant to have.
Are the new system fonts part of the Ice Cream Sandwich SDK? Where might someone acquire a copy for, uh, rigorous comparison purposes?
I've never owned an Android phone, but the Droid family is gorgeous as a UI font on Ubuntu, and the more high-quality fonts available for Linux the better.
Gruber's full posts have a star in the title, anything else is a reference to another page on the web, in which case the title is a link to it.
A 'read more' link would help, I'm used to the way Gruber does it but when other sites do the same things I don't immediately pick up on it (e.g., The Loop does that, I think).
Here's an animation/toggle I did comparing Roboto & Helvetica: http://und.st/pqCj4I.
In the lowercase, there are only 5 letters (a, e, f, g, k) that a normal person would have much chance of distinguishing, even some of those are subtle. The other 21 letters appear virtually identical.
Has anyone compared Roboto to other Helvetica-like fonts?
In other words, it would be interesting to see the differences between Akzidenz-Grotesk, Arial, Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, Roboto, Univers, and Vera. Something like:
My guess is that other than typographers, people mostly cannot tell any of the Helvetica-ish fonts apart, and there are much bigger differences between weights and such.
I've looked at H, H-Nueue, and Roboto at large sizes in FontBook, and frankly, I can't see an important difference. Sure, I can see the differences when I look for them, but they are pretty minor.
One thing that is completely missed by the "letter-by-letter" comparison is that Roboto by default has much looser kerning ("letter-spacing") than Helvetica. This should make some difference when screen reading. IIRC iOS, even version 5, doesn't support kerning in UIKit. Does anyone know if Android does?
Compare to http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Droid+Sans