Android has gone out of its way to revamp its ageing Honeycomb (3.0) It came out with the all new Ice Cream sandwich (4.0) in November of 2011. Since the time of its launch it has been received by the android community with much enthusiasm. Let us look at some of its aspects.
The Home Screen
The most noticeable change is of course the change in the home screen configuration. Although the lock screen is pretty much the same as that on the honeycomb, they have made some welcome changes to the home screen. The home screen has not been changed much since the gingerbread, but in ice cream sandwich, they have introduced a home screen dock. This works pretty much like the iPhone dock where you get to store your most used apps. Widgets can also be resized to your need by double tapping on them.
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Talk to Me
One notable improvement over honeycomb is talk to me. This allows users to type their messages simply by talking to the phone. Though this was already present on the honeycomb, there you had to press a button first to activate this feature. Here it starts automatically as soon as you start talking to the phone.
RAM Conservation
One constant problem android users always complained of was the inability to conserve their RAM. The number of applications running simultaneously could not be managed.
In the Ice cream sandwich, you can scroll through recent apps using the button at the bottom and scroll through the open and recently used apps. You can close unnecessary apps by just flicking at them!
Application Updates
The core Google applications have been updated. The web browser now also functions in the incognito mode. Another welcome change that they made is adding the web page saving feature. You can now save web pages on the net for offline reading later on.
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Contacts can now also be viewed by photograph in a column format. Changes have also been made to the camera. We can now take panoramic pictures and editing tools have been added to the camera app.
The app drawer icon has now been incorporated into the bottom of the touch screen. The app scrolling system has now been changed from vertical scrolling to horizontal scrolling. A different folder for widgets has also been incorporated into this menu.
Android Beam
Android has once again taken a leaf out of apple’s book by emulating the hugely successful iPhone app, bump it. Through android beam, you can share images, videos or applications just by bumping the two android devices together.
Although, this is an improvement over the honeycomb version, estimates show that the most of the market share is still occupied by Gingerbread (Android 2.3). Only about 5% of android users use honeycomb and even lesser use ice cream sandwich. So all in all, if you have a decent android phone capable of handling ice cream sandwich and the version of ice cream sandwich has been released for your phone, I would definitely recommend installing it.