It's better than the last round, but still has a bit of a ways to go on the iphone.
For example, the behavior of clicking one of the slide menus is:
1. The address bar pops down momentarily while the ajax call is made and then disappears after half a second.
2. The loading graphic overlay appears and then disappears.
3. The window pops you back to the top of the original page.
4. The page slides over, and you're on the new page.
5. The new page does a quick half second "flash."
It's progress to be sure, but these little kinks are what need to be ironed out before anyone should consider deploying it.
I actually just finished a web-based ipad demo for a client, and my choices were jqTouch, JQueryMobile or Sencha.
While I love the html syntax for JqueryMobile (Sencha is a giant Javascript function, which had a steep learning curve at first) I felt that the widgets and display quality of jQueryMobile just didn't match that of Sencha.
Sencha's transitions felt faster, animations were smoother, and form items felt more like native parts than in jQueryMobile.
I eventually went with sencha because it produced a better experience on a tablet, but I think I would definitely like to give jQueryMobile a try on my next smartphone project.
It was a problem with both previous versions and it still is a problem. It is so glaringly horrible that I have to assume they are severely restricted by some cross platform plan or dependencies given that jqtouch was able to get the transitions to look quite nice with simple clean css.
See this page (on an iOS device) for comparison.
http://jqtouch.com/preview/demos/main/#animations
As much as I want to like jquerymobile, it just pales in comparison to jqtouch on iOS.
We're actually using hardware-accelerated CSS-based transitions based on jqtouch. The difference is that jqtouch doesn't scroll you back to the position you were on if you navigate back - you always scroll back to the top, then transition so if you're on a long page, click a link, then go back you lose you place. We think that remembering you position is a very important usability feature that's expected on the web so this is included in jQuery Mobile. Unfortunately, it introduces a blink or jump which makes things feel much less smooth.
Page transitions, especially on iOS are an incredibly important issues for the team and we're actively working on improving this. In fact, we have 3-4 different branches exploring various approaches:
https://github.com/jquery/jquery-mobile/issues#issue/455
We weren't able to find a solution in time for a3, but this will continue to improve.
For example, the behavior of clicking one of the slide menus is:
1. The address bar pops down momentarily while the ajax call is made and then disappears after half a second. 2. The loading graphic overlay appears and then disappears. 3. The window pops you back to the top of the original page. 4. The page slides over, and you're on the new page. 5. The new page does a quick half second "flash."
It's progress to be sure, but these little kinks are what need to be ironed out before anyone should consider deploying it.