Calendar
Swiping and pinch-zooming make themselves known in the Calendar app, supporting all the various agendas from your Google, Exchange and other accounts, with the new ability to – webOS style – pinch to expand or shrink how much of the day/week/month is on-screen at a time. That’s useful for flipping between an overview and getting to grips with the specifics of a busy morning, for instance. Color coding is obviously supported, and there are day/week/month/agenda views.
Camera Google’s new camera app introduces zero shutter lag, with the ICS promise being virtually no delay between opening the app, firing off a shot and then capturing subsequent images. In practice, it’s certainly quicker than previous iterations of Android, though we’ve found some of our images have ended up showing blur simply from the movement of tapping screen.
Touch focus works well, though we’d prefer to see both the digital zoom and settings options on-screen simultaneously, not toggle between them. There’s certainly enough space for it. Alternatively pinch-zoom would be a welcome addition, as on the iPhone. For stills there are five scene modes – auto, action, night, sunset and party – along with adjustable exposure, white balance settings and flash control – auto, on and off – while for video there are white balance and LED light options, together with time-lapse shooting (ranging from 1s to 10s). Cleverly you can tap the screen during video recording and save an image, without pausing the video capture.
Video also gets a range of digital effects. Face-tracking is used to morph your subjects in real-time – squeezing their face, giving them oversized or undersized eyes, mouth or nose – or digitally change the background behind them. Having chosen your background (either a preset or an image from the Gallery) you then step out of frame, and when you return you’re digitally overlaid on top. It works, just about, though is more gimmick than anything useful.
Finally, there’s panorama mode, which allows you to create a wide image pieced together automatically from multiple frames. It’s certainly easy to use – hit the button and then pan around, with an on-screen gage showing your progress and pop-up warnings telling you if you’re going too fast – though the end results aren’t always equally impressive. Sometimes ICS seems to struggle pasting the different frames together neatly.
Once you’ve taken shots, there’s on-device photo editing, including Instagram-style filters, red eye reduction, color tweaking and various effects that can be applied. Edited shots are saved as separate copies, leaving the original intact. Sharing is made simple, with a drop-down menu of all the options and Gmail a dedicated button at the top.
Data and Battery Monitoring As more people get to grips with the capabilities of their smartphones, carriers seem to be taking backward steps with their data networks, reducing monthly allowances and following through on expensive out-of-bundle overage fees. ICS introduces granular monitoring of data use, with the option to set global limits – custom to your own particular tariff – as well as investigate which apps have been chomping through megabytes. If you find a particular culprit, you can choose to curtail its background data access altogether. The whole thing could be overwhelming, but Android 4.0′s straightforward draggable guidelines over a graph of use makes it somewhat more approachable.
Similar insights are available for battery use, with a breakdown of which apps or services are most demanding – the core Android OS and the screen were the most gluttonous in the Galaxy Nexus, unsurprisingly – though there’s obviously less flexibility over what to do with power-hungry software. Basically, your choice is to shut it down or use it less, though at least seeing which are the worst culprits can help you eke out more runtime when you’re running low.
Face Unlock Is a phone that recognizes your face a gimmick or the next step in biometrics? Right now, though certainly eye-catching, Google’s Face Unlock feature in Ice Cream Sandwich is more toy than dependable security feature. The concept is clever: you teach your phone what your face looks like, and then next time you go to unlock it it merely looks at you and lets you in.
Facial Recognition, Battery Life, GPU Rendering, and more
More Galaxy Nexus and Android ICS hands on demoUnfortunately, reliability proved patchy. The recognition rate is fairly decent – as long as the lighting is good – but we still experienced more than a few occasions where the Galaxy Nexus would claim either not to recognize us or, even more insulting, that it couldn’t even find a face in-shot. If you’re wearing sunglasses or a hat, that can also confuse the system; we’d like to see multiple profiles supported, so that we could show ICS what we look like in a few different ways and hopefully boost recognition accuracy.
There’s also a reasonably pregnant pause in-between waking the phone up and Face Unlock starting: time within which you could easily have swiped out a traditional security pattern or punched in a PIN. That’s before you get to the well-publicized fact that you can fool the system with a photo of your face. In short, it’s a cool trick for (well lit) parties, but not something we’d entrust anything legitimately confidential to.
Android Beam Google is already pushing NFC as a mobile payments system, but Android Beam uses the short-range wireless technology for data transfer instead. Given the speed and proximity limitations, it’s being positioned as a way to quickly exchange links – such as to webpages, apps, YouTube videos and the like – along with contacts and directions between two phones.
Obviously each phone has to support NFC, which meant we were unable to test it on our Galaxy Nexus review unit, though if we had a Nexus S we could apparently transfer the data as a collected tag. However, having tried it during previous press access, we know it works: simply hold two phones back-to-back, tap the “share” button on-screen, and the data zips across.
Android Market Google’s download store looks just as we’ve seen in recent updates on older devices, with a refreshed block-based UI that’s more engaging than previous iterations. Unfortunately the actual content of the Android Market isn’t entirely up to speed with ICS: as well as the obvious Flash incompatibility, we’ve spotted a few other apps that aren’t included in search results as they’re not yet supported. The official Tumblr app doesn’t work, and several games were also missing.
We’ve also noticed some issues with widgets, though that could also be connected to the font change. Most obvious is the Facebook widget, the “What’s on your mind?” text no longer fitting into its usual space. These problems are likely to get addressed as more developers get access to Ice Cream Sandwich.
Wrap-Up Good software does its job in a clean, consistent way. Great software does all that, but then delights you with its usefulness, the thoughtful moments peppered throughout by developers who really care about their work. That’s the level Android has been elevated to with Ice Cream Sandwich.
Core apps, like the browser, calendar and Gmail “just work” while the UI around them feels tailor-made for multitasking. Google has pared down unnecessary lists and, for the most part, extra button-taps, replacing them with clear iconography, easily learned gestures and bold graphics. It all looks great, certainly better than any manufacturer skin we’ve seen.
Google’s Nexus range always raises the bar for Android OEMs, laying out the company’s expectations for the next generation of mobile devices. With Ice Cream Sandwich, Google has done the same for Android software developers: set a standard by which it – and users – will judge their apps. If Android coders can live up to that challenge, Ice Cream Sandwich will mark a huge turning point in the platform’s lifecycle. Android has always had huge promise: Ice Cream Sandwich delivers on it.
