With Ice Cream Sandwich, Google is hoping to make its Android
operating system more polished and approachable without sacrificing the
power or versatility that gave the OS its geek cred. Yes, the new Roboto
font is slick, but there are some pretty major upgrades under the hood.
Multitasking has improved; there’s a new-and-improved People app; and
you can even unlock your phone with your face. To give you a taste of
Ice Cream Sandwich’s most important new features, we took the software
for a test drive on the brand new Samsung Galaxy Nexus.
1. Front buttons go bye-bye
Ice
Cream Sandwich forgoes the need for physical Back, Home, Menu and
Search buttons by integrating a new System Bar at the bottom of the
screen. There’s three persistent virtual buttons here (Back, Home and
Recent Apps), while ICS exposes more menu options within a separate
Action Bar. Its location varies on the app and includes a search button.
We appreciate that the OS provides increased real estate for content,
but miss being able to press and hold the search button from any screen
to launch Google Voice Actions.
2. Multitasking better than iOS
That
Recent Apps button really comes in handy, displaying thumbnails of open
apps in a vertical stack that you can easily scroll through. Even
better, you can just swipe an app off the screen to close it. This
approach is more straightforward than the iPhone, which forces you to
double tap the home button and then press and hold an app icon before
closing it.
3. Face unlock
There’s probably no easier way to
unlock a phone than staring at it, and that’s exactly what Ice Cream
Sandwich lets you do. Setting up Face Unlock under settings was a cinch,
and it worked well most of the time. Just make sure you have enough
ambient light for the front-facing camera; we had to enter a pin as a
backup a few times when our Galaxy Nexus couldn’t recognize our mug.
Also keep in mind that you can fool the OS by holding up a picture of
yourself. Face Unlock is more of a convenience feature than a security
feature.
4. Resizable widgets
Ice Cream Sandwich wants to put
widgets more front and center, which is why you see a Widgets tab when
you open the Apps menu. And just like on Honeycomb tablets, you can use
widgets scroll through content — like your calendar or inbox. Plus, you
can resize widgets just by pressing and holding on them and then
dragging any one of the corners.
5. Killer camera app
Other Android phones offer this
feature, but we’re glad to see that Ice Cream Sandwich makes a Panorama
mode standard with its camera app. You just swivel your phone to left to
right and the software takes care of the rest. The OS also includes
robust editing capabilities, from auto-fix and cropping to a wide range
of special effects.
6. Notifications clean up their act
While we like that
Android phones let you see notifications with a swipe down from the
screen — Apple copied it for a reason — Ice Cream Sandwich makes it
easier to manage them. You can dismiss individual notifications by just
swiping them off the screen, as opposed to needing to clear them all at
once. You can also dive into settings from this menu with a tap.
7. People app gives contacts a makeover
A new People
app in Ice Cream Sandwich is more inviting than your typical address
book, providing a large profile along with social networking
integration. We liked being able to swipe to the right while viewing a
contact to see Google+ updates and Twitter updates from that person in a
single stream. Too bad Google hasn’t added Facebook yet.
8. Respond to calls with a text
Android
Ice Cream Sandwich makes it easy to ignore incoming calls without being
rude. If you’re too busy to answer, just swipe up and you’ll see a list
of canned text messages you can tap. Choices include “Can’t talk right
now. What’s up?” and “I’ll call you right back.” You can also create a
custom message on the fly. Pretty convenient.
9. Just beam it
This feature will take a while to take
off, but we love the idea. Provided your Ice Cream Sandwich phone has an
NFC (near field communications) chip inside, you can transmit info to
other phones running the latest Android OS just by touching the two
together. With Android Beam you can share anything from contacts and Web
pages to apps and YouTube videos. Beam will get even better once
developers get their hands on Google’s code.
10. Better Web browsing
The new browser in Ice Cream
Sandwich is not only faster than its predecessor, it lets you open up
to 16 browser tabs at once. You can also sync bookmarks from your Google
Chrome account. Tired of getting served mobile versions of your
favorite sites? Just check the Request desktop site option. Offline
reading lets users save specific Web pages for reading without a
connection. Unfortunately, Flash support isn’t coming until later this
year.
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