Quick look at Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich

An OS goes a very long way in defining the success or failure of a phone, or any computing device for that matter. It’s a symbiotic relationship, as without good software, the hardware is useless and without good hardware, the software can’t really shine. For the past many years, we’ve all loved Symbian as an OS and at any given point, almost all of us have owned at least one S60-based smartphone. It wasn’t the fastest or the prettiest, but we had made our peace with it and conditioned our minds to accept that. It’s only till Apple launched the iOS that we realized there is a better and easier way to use our phones. Then came Android from Google, which was designed to give developers the freedom to go crazy with apps and manufacturers the leeway to customize the OS, the way they saw fit.

Over the years, we’ve seen this OS blossom into a very solid solution and offer support for features that would give even the iOS a run for its money. After many dessert-based updates (Éclair, Froyo, etc), we are now at Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) or Android 4.0. Unlike the earlier updates, which were mostly cosmetic and added a few new features in each cycle, Android 4.0 is an ambitious leap forward as it’s designed for smartphones as well as tablets. Honeycomb is a thing of the past now and from now on all consequent versions of Android will be available for both platforms. The craze to get ICS onto one's phone or tablet is spreading like wildfire. Manufacturers are adding the tag ‘ICS upgradeable’ to all their handsets just to make it more appealing. So, is it just another update or is there something more to it than just a quirky name?

What’s New?

ICS is quite a departure from Gingerbread, as the layout for certain functions have been moved around a bit. If you’ve used a Honeycomb tablet, then you’ll feel a bit more at home, else it’ll take some getting used to. The first noticeable change is the lack of physical or capacitive buttons. Just like Honeycomb, the three navigation buttons are now a part of the display known as the System Bar and will always be present at the bottom, no matter what. This means you will lose a bit of screen space. Older phones with capacitive buttons that receive ICS will not have the System Bar, instead these functions will be mapped to the existing buttons. If the three buttons are only ‘Back’, ‘Home’ and ‘Recent Apps’, then you’re wondering how would I access the ‘Options’ menu? For that, we now have an ‘Action Bar’, denoted by three dots. This can be displayed at the top or at the bottom depending on the app. We didn’t really love this feature, as there’s no fixed place for options and it keeps changing from app to app. Once again, older phones benefit from having a fixed options button.

A fresh new look

You can now access the notification bar from the lock screen itself, so if you have music playing and you need to change the track, you need not unlock the screen. The icons in the notification bar, settings and menu are borrowed from Honeycomb. They also have a very flat look to them as there’s no 3D definition. You’ll see this mostly on the Galaxy Nexus and the Nexus S, as most manufacturers will use their own icons. Multitasking once again comes from Honeycomb, showing you the recently used apps along with a thumbnail of the snapshot of the last activity you performed on the app. To close it, you simply swipe it to the left.

Find recent apps easily

The notification bar hasn’t changed and now adds a shortcut to settings. We are really disappointed that Google didn’t add toggle switches for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth etc., by default as it’s extremely handy. Everyone has it, so we wonder what made them skip this feature. The Google search widget is now a prominent fixture on the home screen and does not move, even if you switch screens. This was quite unnecessary to be honest and should have been a widget like before. Speaking of widgets, you can’t access them through the homescreen anymore. They are now part of the apps menu under a separate section. You can now resize the widgets like Gmail, Calendar, etc, but not all of them, like the clock.  

Hardware Accelerated UI
One of the reasons why ICS feels so slick and smooth is that everything is hardware accelerated. Google now uses OpenGL ES to render everything from the built-in apps, to the animations and home screens. Even the stock browser is GPU accelerated, which makes it really quick and responsive. ICS also comes with a special set of Developer options, which let you force GPU rendering on third party apps as well. It’s only a matter of time before developers update their apps to take advantage of this properly.

A new spin on stock apps

Having said this, we did notice a drop in performance with Live Wallpapers enabled. There is a very noticeable jerkiness in the animations, whether you’re switching home screens or browsing through apps. Now since the GPU is constantly working in the background, we feel rendering Live Wallpapers is bit much for the PowerVR SGX 540 GPU in the Galaxy Nexus to handle. We’ll know for sure, if it’s just a bug or not, once ICS hits other phones and tablets with more powerful GPUs like the one in Tegra 3.