This happens annually, doesn’t it? Google employees in shiny suits come out on stage and introduce a product they hope will alter the smartphone scene forever. It’s like this pilgrimage they feel compelled to take — a rite of passage many didn’t expect them to choose three years ago in the first place.
At such an event last week, they announced the new phone they’re going to call their own for a while — the Samsung Google Galaxy Nexus. It runs on Android 4.0, dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich. Now I don’t know what you are going to do with such a gargantuan monster of a phone, but still, Google has made sure the only thing negative you can say about it is that it’s just too big and overpowered. And overpowered it is.
But let’s focus on Ice Cream Sandwich, okay? For starters, the lock and home screen have been spruced up with a few nifty features from Honeycomb tablets, like multiple-unlock options (arranged in a circle), and a “favourites” app stack on the home screen akin to the iOS dock. There’s also an improved app drawer and folders (like on iOS).
Speaking of taking a leaf out of iOS’s book, Android also gets improved notifications in the form of a notification tray and gesture support, along with a recent apps and related actions section, which looks quite useful. Oh, you can also unlock your phone through facial recognition, if you care.
The core apps have received significant facelifts. From the apps shown, the browser now allows Chrome sync, incognito mode, and Gears support. Gmail now has a preview pane and “action bar”, which will help you get around faster.
Android Beam is an experimental feature, which, roughly, will allow you to push data to nearby friends’ phones, wirelessly. Improved text-prediction, gallery effects, Google+ integration, voice recognition, and dialler are a few of the many features that Ice Cream Sandwich has to show off. Google’s intention is quite clear with this upgrade. They want to beat Apple, and beat it fast. And it looks like they’re not wandering too far from that path.