Google's Ice Cream Sandwich, Android 4.0, is the biggest update the popular smartphone platform has received in more than a year. It adds dozens of features, changes and improves the interface, and makes much better use of the latest smartphone hardware. It may finally make Android tablets viable, too. At launch, though, it's missing a few things, most notably Flash and Facebook support, which mean that you may do well waiting a few months before scooping out some Ice Cream for yourself.
The New UI
The new Ice Cream Sandwich UI integrates elements from the Gingerbread phone and Honeycomb tablet UIs into, hopefully, a harmonious system which will work equally well on phones and tablets.
The look employs a lot of subtle shading, a lot of compositing, and a lot of depth, especially compared to the very flat screens in Gingerbread. Powerful GPUs seem to be assumed here, as screens and images almost always have multiple layers. But a generally spare design keeps it feeling like Android: functional, not showy.
The new lock screen shows the date, time, and your wallpaper. To unlock the phone, swipe right, or swipe left to jump directly to the camera. That takes you to one of five home screens, where you can place widgets or icons at will.?You can now create folders on your home screens, and the folder layout is witty and smart: it shows the icons of various items in the folder, stacked. Four favorite icons, now customizable, stay at the bottom of every home screen.
The app drawer is still there, but now it's two-paned: you can flip between apps and a full-screen display of available widgets. Sliding between pages of apps, it looks like each one reveals the next under it.?The multitasking interface borrows from Honeycomb: press a dedicated "multitasking" soft key, and thumbnails of the last several apps you've used ghost above the display. (There's that multi-layer compositing again.)
There are a few frustrating touches. Android's old physical buttons have been replaced by virtual buttons, and they can be a little elusive. On some screens, such as the camera, all the virtual buttons go away, leaving only gray dots. The new Menu button also moves around from app to app, and sometimes you have to search for it. As a longtime Android user, I want to know where my Home and Back buttons are at all times.?
Text selection is also still an issue. To select text to copy or paste, you're supposed to long-press and then move two nicely-sized bookends, but in some apps I found the selection bookends appeared when I was just trying to drag or scroll the screen.
The Cool Features
Along with the new UI come a bunch of great, entirely necessary new features.?Improved Web browser performance is a big deal. The browser benchmarked at double the speed of the Android 2.3 browser, and it has very useful new pop-down menu options: you can easily switch between mobile and desktop views and store pages for offline reading. The browser now scores 100 on the Acid3 test of HTML5 compatibility, as opposed to 95/100 for the Gingerbread browser; font rendering, especially, has been dramatically improved.
Android's contact book got a refit as well. It's borrowed a bit of its look from Windows Phone 7, integrating Twitter, LinkedIn and some other minor social networks, with multiple-pane contact cards showing your friends' most recent status updates, plus the amusing ability to auto-block calls from any of your contacts. While you can manually join contacts from multiple sources, I would have liked to see a smarter auto-join algorithm like the one HTC uses in its HTC Sense software.
The Gmail app is much better looking. You can create new messages without having to press the menu button, there's a bit more preview text for each message in the message list, and in general the new appearance, with more grays and the new Roboto font, is more appealing.
The Camera app has been dramatically improved. It's much, much faster, to the point where I was wondering whether I'd actually taken a picture because it was so fast. That's something we've seen on some devices like the HTC Amaze but appears to be standard in ICS.?The new music player integrates with Google Music, so it has a built-in store and lets you stream from your cloud music library. It also shows a cool little VU meter when you're playing songs, and has an extensive graphic equalizer.
I really like the new data-management screen in Settings, which lets you monitor how much cellular data you've been using day by day, project your usage for the month, and issue automatic warnings. In this era of data caps and prepaid phones, this is an extremely useful utility.
Potential in APIs
ICS brings a lot of underutilized Honeycomb features to phones. They were underutilized because nobody was buying Honeycomb tablets and thus the features never had a market. But they're exciting: accelerated 2D and 3D graphics APIs (read: better games), more Bluetooth profiles and support for more input devices (read: better game controls), and enterprise-level encryption for business devices. Phone makers have been adding some of those features to Gingerbread, but now hopefully they'll have a wide enough base to actually take off.
In ICS, a new "social API" lets third-party social networks integrate into the address book. Third-party apps also get better access to the calendar, and there are a bunch of new streaming media and codec features. Let's not forget the browser, either: a more HTML5-friendly browser means better Web apps.?I'm also intrigued by Wi-Fi Direct, which lets devices connect directly to each other without a router or hotspot. That could eliminate the need for syncing cables, if it's easy enough to use.?
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/fahh51zKU5Y/0,2817,2396697,00.asp
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