Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich





The next version of each smartphone's operating system is always the best. We impatiently wait for the latest and greatest firmware to come around, expecting it to liberate us from the shackles of last year's code and features that haven't shown up yet. This happens incessantly with Google's Android OS, and version 4.0 -- unveiled at this year's I/O conference in May -- is no different. Known as Ice Cream Sandwich (referred to henceforth as ICS), the last word in the title indicates the merging of Gingerbread, the most recent phone platform, and Honeycomb, the version optimized for use on tablets. We knew this much, but were otherwise left with conjecture as to how the company planned to accomplish such a feat -- and what else the new iteration had in store.

But now the time of reckoning is upon us, and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus -- Android 4.0's mother ship -- is slowly spreading across the globe, its users being treated to this year's smartphone dessert. ICS is one of the largest and most important upgrades we've witnessed from Android since its humble beginnings, making a huge change in user experience as well as a massive number of bullet points on the list of features. Now that we've had the opportunity to take it for a spin, where does it stand in the ranks of mobile operating systems? Follow us beneath as we dig into the layers of this sweet sandwich.
On skins and stock ICS
In beginning our deep-dive of ICS, we'll be quick to point out that, much like the HTC-made Nexus One and the Samsung Nexus S preceding it, the Galaxy Nexus is running the pure vanilla and completely unskinned iteration of the OS it's ushering in. This means we're looking at ICS the way Google designed it, and not an OEM's interpretation such as on Samsung's TouchWiz, HTC's Sense or Motorola's not-so-Blur. Just as before, different skins lying on top of ICS are like having 31 flavors of ice cream: your experience with a Neapolitan-flavored sandwich may vary widely from one with Rocky Road inside.

We won't pretend to know what changes these OEMs will make to the user experience, but rest assured that they'll be just as rampant as ever. While we're definitely fond of the improvements Google's made to ICS as a whole, it'll be intriguing to see how widely the interface differs from phone to phone.


Booting up
Do you remember the last time you booted up a brand new Android device? It was a sweet moment, we'll bet, and the setup procedure remains largely unchanged, as you still have to either sign up for a Google account or throw in your existing login codes. New to the process, however, is the option to tie a Google+ account to your device as well and lets you enter credit card information for Market purchases. The handset begins to sync in the background after you exit the bootup menus, a process that will take several minutes; we strongly recommend you connect your device to a WiFi network during setup, since ICS will hook you up with email, contacts, calendar entries, books, Picasa albums and Chrome bookmarks -- all data-intensive activities that eat gigabytes for breakfast. Put your finger on the top left corner of the screen and draw a clockwise square. Doing so will activate all of the accessibility features and take you directly into a tutorial on how to use them.


User inter

One of the first things you'll notice when making the journey to ICS is the color scheme. Gone is the lime green-on-black theme present on Gingerbread, and in its place comes a subtle light blue-on-gray motif. There are five home panels at your disposal, and there's no option to add or take away screens. Along the bottom is a "favorites tray" capable of holding up to four shortcuts -- besides the standard app tray button, of course -- doubling the previous version's layout of two (phone and browser). And while stock Gingerbread wouldn't allow those icons to be swapped, ICS does -- heck, you can even put folders here or just get rid of all of the apps altogether. The fact is, you're now given the choice, something we deeply appreciate.
While we're on the subject, folders have definitely graduated in design, transforming from ugly manila covers to transparent circles showing your apps inside, piled on top of one another. In fact, it almost has a look reminiscent of -- dare we say -- iOS. Sure, there's the obvious difference in shape, but all it takes to create a new folder is the act of dragging one icon on top of another. Once established, it's easy to rename your new creation.

The app tray's definitely grown and matured to sport a Honeycomb-style look and feel. Instead of one continuous panel that you navigate by scrolling up and down, the menu actually consists of multiple panels that you navigate by swiping left and right (a la TouchWiz). Long-pressing an app from here will bring up a birds-eye view of your five home screens, as well as a couple options above them: uninstall and app info. Dragging the app to either option will trigger the appropriate action.
The widgets galleries can be accessed by touching the second tab at the top of the app tray, or by swiping the panels from right to left until you get there. Several widgets are now resizeable -- a feature present in Honeycomb but not in anything 2.x or earlier -- and can be adjusted dynamically as soon as they begin taking up real estate on your screen.

Another welcome addition to the ICS scene is the row of virtual navigation buttons on the bottom: back, home and task switcher. The menu button -- mandatory to all pre-ICS phones -- is completely gone, as is the search (a moot point, given the standard Google search bar on the top of each home panel as well as search options in most apps). We doubt that they'll be missing from every ICS-enabled device, though; in fact, we'd be more shocked if we didn't see a virtual search button pop up on a proprietary skin rather than the other way around. We're also curious to see how the menu button on legacy devices (that is, phones upgrading from Gingerbread that still utilize hardware or capacitive keys) will be applied to ICS, however, because the stock OS is designed to work specifically without that button getting involved. 

Unlike previous versions of Android, soft keys on the stock OS don't offer long-press shortcuts. The task switcher, once accessed by holding down the home button, now shares an equal amount of real estate on the bottom row of virtual keys. A quick press of the switcher brings up a vertical list of all of your running programs, displayed in a way that will make Honeycomb users giddy. The only way you can be absolutely positive that your app's no longer running behind the scenes is to go into the Apps section of your Settings menu and manually stopping the process.
The notification bar also got a facelift. It's still accessed the same way as before -- sliding your finger down from the top -- but you can also reach it on the phone's lock screen if you prefer (more on that later). Much to our satisfaction, we were happy to see that rather than only being able to clear all of our notifications in one fell swoop, most of them can be swept away one by one with a flick of the finger to the left or right; you can still clear them all out at the same time, however, by hitting the "x" in the top right corner.


If extra security is what you need, ICS still offers you the usual suspects of PIN and pattern lock, though you sacrifice direct access to the camera and notification bar. But Google threw a unique technological nugget into its latest OS in Face Unlock, which theoretically cranks the security knob on your phone up to eleven.

Face Unlock

It's pretty easy to forget all about every other feature or UI enhancement in ICS considering the amount of buzz being generated by Face Unlock. We'll admit, we were pretty enticed by the feature as well at first, but let's not kid ourselves here: it's a gimmick. Clever, sure, but it's not as secure as you might think it is.

Here's how it works: go to the security settings, select screen lock and choose "face unlock." The camera then memorizes your face -- or at least, the shape of it -- and asks you to submit a PIN code or pattern lock just in case it doesn't recognize you, which honestly happens more than we'd like. In fact, we saw both extremes: our faces typically weren't recognized if we angled our head slightly away from the camera or if we tried to unlock the phone in low light, but the phone easily recognized our face in the mirror and when wearing glasses. Even worse, we were able to gain access to the phone simply by holding our picture up to the camera.

Face Unlock still needs some tweaking before it's ready for primetime, but the feature is still a clever gimmick that you can show off to your friends -- provided you're in a room with adequate lighting, that is.

Phone

Yeah, it has a dialpad and you can push numbers and make it call people. But what else can you do in the phone app? The first and foremost improvement is called "quick response," which allows you to reject an incoming call and fire back a text message letting the caller know that you're otherwise predisposed. Four different messages are allowed, and you can stick with the preset list of message options or swap them out with your own custom ones.

The phone app itself has also received an ICS makeover, with smooth black and blue tones throughout, simplistic icon-based tabs on the top bar along with search and options on the bottom. Moving between tabs is now just a matter of swiping right or left. The contact tab now offers a unified listing, integrating all of your social networks and Google services (such as Gmail and Google+) into one crazy mix. Fortunately ICS gives you the chance to be picky and opt out of specific services you don't care to add into the list. High-res photos are also now allowed in the contacts tab, which means that you have a large and high-quality image of your friend or family member getting all up in your face when they call you.


Gmail

Liked Gmail on your Gingerbread device before? It was pretty good before, but we have a hunch that you'll love it even more now. For one, you can actually create new messages without having to press an options key. In fact, most of Gmail's most used features have been brought forward to the app's forefront in ICS.

In the inbox you'll see an extra line of text for each email, showing off the first few words. This is an improvement over Gingerbread's version, which merely shows the subject and sender, leaving the actual body of the message as much of a surprise as a birthday present. When you get into the individual email, you're given plenty of options, such as assigning labels, replying, marking it as an important message (or spam, for that matter), marking as unread and archiving / deleting the email. When you're ready to the next message, all you have to do is swipe to the left or right to move along to another email conversation.



Browser

It's hard to know where to begin with the browser, as so many features and elements of its performance were affected by the upgrade. Besides the temporary omission of mobile Flash (which we'll discuss in more detail later), we had a hard time finding something to dislike. First, the ICS browser has certainly sped up; while benchmarks aren't a tremendous indicator of real-life performance, we were still quite happy to see SunSpider 9.1 bring up a time of 1,850ms. To offer perspective, the Samsung Galaxy S II, another well-oiled machine with hefty oomph underneath the hood, rarely dips down below 3,000. The Acid3 test on the Galaxy Nexus also scored a perfect 100 / 100.
Another new feature in the browser is an option to request the desktop version of sites; we find this concern often when navigating to Engadget, since we normally have to scroll all the way to the bottom of our mobile site to switch over to the desktop flavor. Having our browser do this automatically makes for a much faster and more enjoyable experience while surfing the net.

Lastly, check out the Labs option in the browser settings, where you'll discover a clever UI element that's not thrown into the browser by default. When enabled, you can pull up a three-button menu by swiping your finger from the left or right edge of the screen. This semi-circular menu gives you fast access to your open browser tabs (by the way, you can now have 16 open simultaneously), settings and the hidden URL bar at the top. Traditional Android users may not prefer it, but we found ourselves quickly growing attached to this new method of navigating around the browser. Tip: holding down the tab button while in this mode will prompt a small menu to pop up on the screen that shows your other open windows without having to leave the site you're currently viewing (seen above).



Google+


Hangouts. In ICS's version of Google+, you're now able to join hangouts -- a feature we've always felt was wrongly missing from the app. The ten-person limit applies here, but you'll be able to do video group chats with your friends or associates. Keep in mind, however, that just because you can join 'em doesn't mean you can create 'em. Perhaps that's a bullet point on the list of features that just didn't make the cut in time.

As mentioned earlier, Google's definitely plugging its social networking service into more nooks and crannies on the OS by prompting you to sync your Google+ account from the start, infusing status updates with the People app, integrating it into image sharing (as well as several other sharing options scattered throughout the OS) and offering new widgets for the home panels. The company's determined to make its new service work, and we can't think of a better way to do that than expose the heck out of it to millions of Android users.

Talk

We'd mention that the Google Talk app has a completely new design to fit with ICS, but let's face it -- nearly every native app on the new version of Android has been revamped, so this isn't any new revelation by any stretch of the imagination. Aside from UI, however, ICS has spiced up Talk's video chat service by adding image stabilization as well as a few fun (read: pointless) live visual effects that we'll cover in slightly more detail in the camera section.

Music Player
The music app in 4.0 brings an equalizer, 3D surround and bass boost effects. We were also told by Google that the player is designed to be faster in ICS, though we didn't necessarily see a noticeable difference overall.



Movie Studio
Honeycomb's Movie Studio has migrated to ICS, and much like its counterpart, it's ideally suited for creating fun little video clips rather than turning into a mobile substitute to your computer's movie editor. You can combine videos together, shorten or lengthen each individual clip, and top it off with a music track of your choice. It's simple, but not laden with features. As phones become more powerful, we'd like to see the number of editing tools increase, effectively turning our Android devices into fully functional movie-making machines.



Screenshots


WiFi Direct

WiFi Direct is a relatively new concept for phones, one that hasn't been highly utilized. Essentially, the tech enables devices to connect directly to one another without needing a router or internet connection to act as a middleman. In other words, it gives your Android phone another method of sharing pictures, files or just about anything else with your desktop computer -- but it can also connect a group of gamers, stream media content from your ICS phone to an audio player, print files and so on.

















Hardware Acceleration

To be clear, hardware acceleration was an option made available for Honeycomb tablets and has finally been expanded to cover phones in ICS. Ultimately, Google's added framework support for hardware acceleration in both versions so that developers can enable it on their apps simply by adding a single line of code.









Honeycomb API

There are plenty of elements introduced in Honeycomb that still hadn't seen the light of day in a phone, so ICS includes several of them in the package. In addition to the features we've discussed already, here are a few more: renderscript 3D graphics, HTTP live streaming, improved screen-support API, property-based animation, MTP / PTP file transfers and support for RTP.

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