Android™ 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, is bringing more than an entirely new look and feel to the popular mobile platform. Here’s a quick tour of the enhanced features, flexible options and cool highlights that have everyone excited.
More Flexible and Feature-Rich User Interface
Android 4.0 serves up more of the features and flexibility people have come to love. Ice Cream Sandwich makes it easier to multi-task and keep track of open apps. It offers highly customizable home screens with resizable widgets. Plus, fonts and type are now easier to read. Android 4.0 impresses with its intuitive and polished user interface — first available on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus™ smartphone.
Here are some of the new user interface highlights:
- Multitasking just keeps getting better with new features that let you seamlessly move between tasks, view recent apps, and manage incoming messages.
- Seamless Design creates a clean look with virtual Back, Home, and Recent Apps buttons that remove all off-screen buttons from the phone’s face.
- Resizable widgets that can be easily expanded to show more content; or shrink them down to save space.
- Time-saving lock screen actions let you leapfrog directly to tasks, such as taking photos, checking messages or playing music.
- Swipe for faster response to dismiss notifications, tasks and browser tabs that may pop up.
- Improved text input and spell-checking for greater accuracy and speed. Error correction and word suggestions have also been enhanced thanks to a new and improved set of dictionaries.
- Powerful voice input engine that lets you dictate text, speak continuously for an extended time, pause for intervals, and even add punctuation to create grammatically correct sentences.
- Control over-network data to better meet your needs if you have a tiered or metered data plan.
- Greater accessibility tools for the blind and visually impaired, including explore-by-touch mode.
Greater Communication and Easier Sharing
Another one of the main areas of focus is how Android 4.0 is specifically designed for the way people live—and share—their lives. It provides many rich communication and social touchpoints across the system, making it even easier to talk, email, text and post just about anything.
- New People app and richer profile information includes a larger profile picture, phone numbers, addresses, status updates, events and one handy button for connecting on integrated social networks.
- Unified calendar brings together all your personal, work, school and social agendas in one manageable place. Other applications can also be given permission to contribute events for an integrated view across multiple calendars.
- Visual voicemail features integrate incoming messages, voice transcriptions, and audio files messages from one or more providers all in one place.
- Rich and versatile camera capabilities let users capture and edit sharp images and easily share them with friends and family. The built-in face detection locates faces in the frame and automatically sets focus for greater clarity.
- Redesigned Gallery app complete with Photo Editor makes it a snap to manage, display,show , and share all your photos and videos.
- Live Effects for transforming video add intrigue, interest and fun and cool effects to any of your videos captured in the Camera app. Change the background, set morphing effects, and transform facial features with the tap of a finger.
- Screenshot sharing lets you snap a screenshot, store it locally, and easily edit, view or share it in other apps.
Expanded Cloud Connectivity
Android 4.0 lets you better harness the power of cloud computing with greater ease and flexibility. By adding several new browsing and email features, you now can have access to more capabilities while still keeping your communications organized and simple.
- Powerful web browsing lets you instantly sync and manage Google Chrome™ bookmarks from all of their accounts, jump to their your favorite content faster, and save a copy for offline reading.
- Improved email management features smarter auto-completion capabilities that help you find and add frequent contacts more quickly. Inputting frequently used text and replying to messages are also greatly enhanced, including an integrated menu of accounts and a resizable email widget for better organization.
Innovation that’s Simply Brilliant
Lastly, Android 4.0 pushes the boundaries of communication and sharing with new jaw-dropping capabilities, including:
- Android Beam for NFC-based sharing lets you instantly exchange your favorite apps, contacts, music, videos—virtually anything by simply tapping two near field communication (NFC) devices together.
- Face Unlock lets users access their device with state-of-the-art facial recognition technology. The front-facing camera identifies your image and unlocks your device instantly.
- Wi-Fi Direct™ and Bluetooth® HDP lets users connect directly to nearby peer devices over Wi-Fi®, for more reliable, higher-speed communication, eliminating the need for an internet connection or tethering.
Android 4.0 Updates
Will your Samsung device receive an update to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS)? See the list.
Galaxy is a trademark of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Nexus, Google and Android are trademarks of Google Inc. The Android robot is reproduced or modified from work created and shared by Google and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License. Company names, product names and marks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners and may be trademarks or registered trademarks. Screen images simulated. Phone appearance may vary.
