Welcome the next generation of Android OS Ice Cream Sandwich! Google finally unveiled Android 4.0 and the most amazing Android Smartphone Galaxy Nexus to the world (checkout the specs here). With the latest ICS Google taking android to the next level in order to make it the most convenient mobile OS enhancing the features that most people would love – easy multitasking, rich notifications, customizable home screens, resizable widgets, and deep interactivity. Let’s have a look at some major changes in Ice Cream Sandwich.
New Lock Screen and Face Unlock: The first major changes came in Lockscreen. While the lockscreenn is very familiar for those who used Honeycomb (similar way drag the circle to the right to unlock but with more actions such as users can
directly open the camera app sliding left or
pull down the notifications window), Google integrated facial recognition functionality to unlock the device by simply looking at the front-facing camera.
System Bar and
Action Bar: Once Unlocked the next thing you’ll notice is instead of using physical buttons a system bar has been
placed, Virtual buttons let users navigate instantly to Back, Home, and Recent Apps. The
System Bar and virtual buttons are present across all apps, but can be dimmed by applications for full-screen viewing. Users can access each application’s contextual options in the
Action Bar, displayed at the top (and sometimes also at the bottom) of the screen.
Notifications: See real-time updates and notifications from apps, control music player right in to notification tray and much more. On smaller-screen devices, notifications appear at the top of the screen, while on larger-screen devices they appear in the System Bar.
The home screen changes brings the ability to create folders and let users group their apps and shortcuts logically, just by dragging one onto another. From the All Apps launcher, users can now simply drag an app to get information about it or immediately uninstall it, or disable a pre-installed app. A
favorites tray visible from all home screens where users can put priority items for quick access.
Resizable widgets: Widgets are now intractable and got new customizable features such as users can check email, flip through a calendar, play music, check social streams, and more as widgets work like live application. Users can scroll, Flip and even resize them.
Multitasking: Clicking on the multitask button in the system bar pop ups the running apps list with thumbnail image where user can
quickly switch between apps or discard them.
Gesture control, Swipe to dismiss notifications, tasks, and browser tabs: In Android 4.0 google introduced gestures control to move between screen, contacts, picture, and different pages within applications, dismiss a browser tab with just a simple swipe of a finger even on multitasking screen swiping a app off screen will close it. Similarly notifications can be swipe off to make clear or disappear them.
Improved text input and spell-checking and Powerful voice input engine: Android 4.0 makes text input even faster and more accurate. Error correction and word suggestion are improved through a new set of default dictionaries, a spell-checker that locates and underlines errors and suggests replacement words. Word suggestion is also improved and the suggestion strip is simplified to show only three words at a time.
A powerful new voice input engine that offers a continuous “open microphone” experience and streaming voice recognition. Watch text instantly appear as you speak with voice input. Touch the microphone on the keyboard and use your voice to instantly type your emails, SMS, or anywhere you want to enter text.
People and profiles: A new People app that offers richer profile information, including a large profile picture, phone numbers, addresses and accounts, status updates, and a new button for connecting on integrated social networks.
New camera features, Redesigned Gallery app with photo editor: Google put does work hard to improve the camera app in Ice Cream Sandwich then they did before in previous Android versions, and interestingly they did a good job this time. The app completely revamped and a lot of new features has been added such as continuous focus, zero shutter lag exposure, and decreased shot-to-shot speed for taking clear image. Stabilized image zoom lets users compose photos and video in the way they want, including while video is recording. Antjer great thing is users can even take a high quality snapshot while they shooting video. Geo tagging and facial recognition make it easy to create automatic photo albums based on people and location.
The most amazing feature is a built in
photo editor has been puted right in to Gallery app which let user quickly edit an image and add effects then directly share it on social network.
Other key features:
Live Effects for transforming video which is fun and let users add a custom background while taking picture or shooting and even use while video chatting user can show some silly face effects
Android Beam for NFC-based sharing finally makes it easy to share files between NFC capabele device. For apps sharing it pushes a link for the specific app and it open directly android market page on the other device.
Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth HDP let users connect with other devices over Wi-Fi without any internet connection just like peering with bluetooth for instant sharing of files, photos, or other media; streaming video or audio from another device; or connecting to compatible printers or other devices. Bluetooth Health Device Profile (HDP) will allows to connect to wireless medical devices and sensors in hospitals, fitness centers, homes, and elsewhere.
So, what you think? Android just got even better! Stay tuned with us at
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