Google has just officially revealed Android 4.0, aka Ice Cream Sandwich, or in its acronym form ICS. It’s packed full of many new amazing features and drastic UI changes (all for the better), and as promised it unifies the Android experience between  both tablets and smart-phones.

Matias Duarte took to the stage to give us the presentation of Ice Cream Sandwich which includes new features like the buttonless design, facial recognition, others from Honeycomb we’ve already seen and much much more, keep reading if you want the low down.

UI Changes

There’s no more buttons on the bottom of the device, it has got a  button-less design that’s part of the UI, they hide when not needed, like Honeycomb, and rotate like the HTC Incredible S. One major thing Android was always getting criticised about was its lack of consistency among the general UI and applications, ICS seems to have eradicated this problem, with a magazine like layout. The launcher has been completely changed as well, it looks a lot like Honeycomb, and the dock at the bottom is customisable with applications of your choice. You can even drop contacts and folders into it.

Everything has been overhauled, the design is really different and all for the better, it looks really good. To go into all the changes it would take for ever so here are some pictures thanks to Engadget to give you a general idea.

New Features

Other than just all the UI changes, ICS brings with it many new features, some we’ve already seen on Honeycomb but drastically improved. For example, you can now pull down the notification tray, and swipe left or right to remove unwanted notifications, everything seems much more fluid, you can even use the same gesture while multitasking to close a desired application. The keyboard has also been been improved upon, it’s a whole lot more accurate and even that has different look and feel to it. Voice input is now much faster as it updates almost instantly word for word as you speak. You’ll no longer require root in order to take screen-shots, which is generally something everyone has been waiting for, so thumbs up for that.

As speculated earlier, Facial recognition has also been added as a security measure, although the demo for facial recognition unlocking didn’t go as planned for Matias, possible due to the lighting or maybe because he was smiling too hard, we’ll never know why, but things like this tend to happen during demos.

Changes have also been made to the camera, the ability to take pictures much quicker with “zero-lag”, editing pictures natively and even the ability to take panorama images which got the crowd applauding  for some reason.

One feature that really stood out for me was Android beam, it takes advantage of the in built NFC chip and lets users share different types of data with another NFC enabled device. A user can share Google Maps information, contacts, YouTube videos, and applications among other things.

Conclusion

Overall Ice Cream Sandwich looks amazing, it’s fast, smooth, has consistent UI and the unbelievable amount of new and improved features truly make it a formidable OS.

 ”Android is enchanting.  Something beautiful, seductive, and something you can easily fall in love with.”

And I’ll leave it with that quote as it’s past 6AM now, and I need some shut eye, as usual let us know what you think.

Source: Engadget