Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich"

4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich"

And that leads us to our current state of affairs with the recent release of Android 4.0 on the Galaxy Nexus, a return to the Nexus program — and a second visit to Samsung, which had provided last year's Nexus S for the launch of Gingerbread. Ice Cream Sandwich is, without question, the biggest change for Android on phones yet — but many of its new features and design elements got their start in Honeycomb, including virtual buttons, the transition from green to blue accents, improved widget support, multitasking with a scrollable list of thumbnails, and "action bars" within applications.

Longtime Android users are well acquainted with Droid, the custom-designed typeface that's been used since 1.0. Ice Cream Sandwich replaces it with another bespoke font — Roboto — that is said to be designed to take better advantage of today's higher-resolution displays, and Google has been keen to promote leading up to the version's release. Android design boss Matias Duarte noted that the old font "struggled to achieve both the openness and information density we wanted in Ice Cream Sandwich," whereas Roboto is said to avoid some anti-aliasing pitfalls ("grey mush," as he calls it) at any scale.

And one of Android's defining (and oldest) features saw a thorough refresh in 4.0, too. The aging notification screen is still one of the best implementations available in a mobile platform, but ICS improves it by making individual notifications removable simply by swiping them off the screen. In older versions, your only options were to clear them all — not always the desired behavior — or to acknowledge the notification in question by pressing it, which would usually send you into an application that you may not want to be in.

Google has quietly tweaked Android's soft keyboard in virtually every version since it launched in Cupcake, and ICS is no exception — in fact, it's as big of a leap forward as Gingerbread's was. The physical design and layout of the keys is largely unchanged, but the correction intelligence driving it has been overhauled, and real-world suggests that the changes are working wonders. Alongside, the platform gets an attractive implementation of inline spellcheck and replacement — not unlike iOS — with red underlining for misspelled words and on-the-spot dictionary adding. For the first time, text entry, clipboard support, and soft keyboard quality feel as though they're as good as anything on the market.

And that's just the start:

More home screen improvements. As we'd mentioned, ICS's home screen adopts many of the changes that Honeycomb brought into the fold, but it adds a couple new tricks, too. Folders can now be created simply by dragging one icon onto another, at which point they appear as a three-dimensional stack of icons rising out of a black circle — a nice look. The home screen also gets a "favorites tray," which mirrors the configurable dock functionality seen on third-party launchers and some OEM skins over the last couple years. Unlike Froyo and Gingerbread which had the Phone and Browser apps permanently docked to the bottom of the screen, the favorites tray lets the user decide what shortcuts should lie there (the defaults are Phone, People, Messaging, and Browser, but you can have whatever you like).

Android Beam. NFC support was heavily touted with the release of Gingerbread and the Nexus S — but apart from the limited rollout that Google Wallet has seen so far, there's been virtually no practical application to the capability whatsoever. ICS looks to change that with a new feature called Android Beam that allows two Beam-enabled phones to transfer data just by touching them together, and it's open — developers can extend it and use it however they see fit.

Face unlock. In addition to the pattern and password locks already supported, Android 4.0 adds a face unlock that uses the phone's front-facing camera to look for a match. It's arguably more of a novelty than anything else since it can be defeated with a picture of the individual who owns the phone — but for situations where only low to medium security are required, it's an interesting new option.

Data usage analysis. Just as Gingerbread improved visibility into battery usage by application, Android 4.0 does the same thing for data usage. You can see overall usage broken down by any time period you like (and set alerts to prevent overage), but additionally, you can drive down on an application-by-application basis and see what's eating your megabytes.

New calendar and mail apps. The Gmail and traditional email experiences on Android 4.0 have been extensively overhauled with new, crisper designs and "action bar" support — functionality carried over from Honeycomb. The calendar app has a unified view for the first time, convenient for those using multiple accounts on their device