The war on mobile devices is very much on between Apple and Google, the two giants in technology in present time. While the beginning was with a humble initiation of Android; which angered a lot of people in Apple and the Google OS, has now become the most used smartphone OS in the world. Today we are going to discuss 10 prominent features of Google’s new Ice Cream Sandwich OS which is all set to pose powerful challenges to iOS 5. Take a look.
1. Redesigned user Interface
The first definitive change which is very noticeable with Ice Cream Sandwich is the introduction of a brand new user interface. Though it is not as radically new as Metro interface in Windows Phone, Google certainly put a great amount of effort to merge the existing features of Android Gingerbread and Honeycomb into a single and comprehensive operating system. The new consistent look and feel across the OS is fantastically fluid and intuitive. The influence of Microsoft’s Metro design is prevalent but not overwhelming similar in Ice Cream Sandwich UI and manages to keep a distinctive Android feel. According to Google, the new interface is dubbed magazine styled.
2. People app
While controversial as a rip off of Windows Phone’s People Hub, People app in Ice Cream Sandwich promises to do much more in terms of keeping contact information and connecting them with appropriate social networks and inclusion of native support for Google+. The data is then displayed using a card like interface which is very similar to Windows Phone 7.5 Mango.
3. Brand new browser
Google promised a lot better browsing experience with their new Ice Cream Sandwich OS and they did not fail to deliver it. Though Chrome is not yet integrated with Ice Cream Sandwich as the primary browser, most likely it will come as such in near future and the Webkit based browser on Ice Cream Sandwich is no slouch. The browser can sync with Chrome, has tabs and support for private or ‘incognito’ mode as Google calls it. The preliminary browser benchmarks are more than positive and signals a fantastic browsing experience.
4. Face unlock
Lock screens on touch based phones are nothing new and swiping your fingers followed by putting the pass code can become quite tiresome after using it for a long time. Google is attempting to change all that by providing a feature called ‘Face Unlock’ which uses the front facing camera on Ice Cream Sandwich based handsets to detect the face of user to unlock his/her phone without the need for putting a passcode or anything similar.
5. Android beam
Near Field Communication or NFC is getting more and more prevalent with time. Google has been always vocal for the support of NFC on Android and recently launched Google Wallet service for their Nexus devices that enables user to complete a payment just using the Android phone without the need of credit/debit card or anything like that. Android Beam aims to multiply the possibilities with NFC technology and enables users to share all kinds of data between handsets like pictures, music, games or websites by placing their phones side by side.
6. Improved input methods
It is great to see that Google also remembered the nifty things like improving the input methods in Android which already has a pretty good text input system. The predictive text input system has been improved with better heuristics and dictionary support for detecting spelling errors instantly and suggesting the proper and possible corrections. It also supports a lot of proper nouns now like popular place names etc.
7. Improved voice recognition
Hot on the heels of Apple’s amazing and somewhat gimmicky voice recognizing personal assistant ‘Siri’, Google did not attempt for a direct competitor and rather improved their already prevalent Google Voice. The voice input engine now comes with a better continuous voice recognition system that will recognize the users’ voice in a manner of fluid, continuous stream. Users can now talk with pauses in between that will not confuse the phone to skip the recording.
8. Better multitasking and app history
Proper multitasking on mobile platforms are still something needs to be ventured as the absence of symmetric multiprocessing is still prevalent. Ice Cream Sandwich comes with a lot better app switching experience, one of the primary concerns of the Android user community till now. While Google addressed the issue with reasonable efforts in Honeycomb, being a tablet only OS did not solve much for the smartphone market. Ice Cream Sandwich has a dedicated task switching button on the system bar which will instantly give you a list of running tasks in terms of a scrollable lists with live previews on large thumbnails an allows to switch to any of the running task instantly with just a tap.
9. Data usage
Google aims to end the bullying of telecom providers as they mostly throws a overcharged rate for data usage beyond certain limits or caps the download/upload speeds to a crawling. Their brand new app called Data Usage can be used to fix a data limit in a monthly basis and showing the individual data usage by different applications on the phone so you can easily find out your usage pattern and suit yourself accordingly. The monthly data limit and a warning level can also be set by users which will give a timely warning before the limit runs out.
10. Camera
Ice Cream Sandwich’s new Camera apps is nothing less than awesome with offers zero shutter lag and negligible lag between the shots. And from the initial tests, it can be said confidently that they were not bluffing. Continuous focus while shooting video, image stabilization while zooming, face detection and tap to focus are also present on the default camera app. Google also introduced a new panorama mode which enables the users to sweep through the environment for an impressive panorama shot. The camera shots the images automatically in between and stitches the images together without any visible lags to give a fantastic panorama shot.
