Techcitement Review: Will Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich Take the Cake?

One addition that has nothing to do with webOS (but maybe a tiny bit to do with Apple’s iOS) is the method for making folders on any of your home screens. Simply hold down an app and drag it together with another. This is great for saving screen real estate and for sorting your most used apps.

Before this, I had an entire home screen set aside for my Google Apps

For those of you on a network that throttles you if you use to much data (i.e., all of the big four other than Sprint), a Data Usage app has been added to the Setting menu. This lets me see, for example, that I’ve already used almost 2 GB of data in two weeks. Which is good to know, because I thought I was doing all that Pandora streaming via my home wireless.

That's a whole lot of Laurie Berkner (don't judge me).

Instead of pressing and holding on the main screen to call up an add menu, you now add widgets from the app drawer. It took all of one day to get used to this though, and it makes sense the more I think about it. Also, it’s alleged that the lack of any kind of shutter lag in the camera is software based, not hardware based, and photo happy folks have ICS to thank. I was impressed by this feature, but would need to see it on another phone to confirm the claim.

I knocked Android 2.3.5 (Gingerbread) for not being able to control the music app via the notification area on the home screen, like I can in webOS. This is fixed in ICS. Annoyingly, it only seems to work for the built-in Google Music app, and not Pandora. Still, this is a step in the right direction. As the cherry on top, Google has finally built screenshots into the operating system. This may not matter to the majority of users out there, but it absolutely made my day.

The Bad
Google doesn’t get my love for changing the app menu so it now goes side to side instead of scrolling down. I far prefer the side to side for home pages/up and down for apps that every previous version of Android had. In fact, the side-to-side app menu in Samsung’s TouchWiz skin was one of the things that annoyed me most about it.

The transition effects are keen though.

The next ding applies to almost every mobile phone OS. I hate that there’s no bundled, out of the box file manager. Android gets points for being the easiest one to add a file manager to, and most manufacturers add some kind of file manager to their skin.

One of the most heavily promoted features of ICS was Face Unlock,  the ability to use the camera to unlock your phone. This is a cute concept, but it only worked about a third of the time I tried it. Throw in the factor of commuting in before sunrise and a simple PIN code seems like a better solution. I do like how you can go from the lock screen straight to the camera (another lift from HTC’s Sense skin) or notifications.

The Galaxy Nexus includes a Near Field Communications chip a.k.a. NFC. This is what phones need to run Google Wallet. However, Verizon has chosen not to include this app. Yes, there are ways to get it on there, but it’s annoying that there’s presently no bundled solution to use this neat bit of tech. Speaking of apps, be aware that oodles of apps have not yet been updated for ICS and may have issues. I only ran into two such cases.

I was surprised at how inaccurately I was typing on the keyboard [Note to editor: hush]. Word suggest helped, but there was something a bit off. Consensus around the Techcitement water cooler is that the something was me. This was offset when one of our writers pointed out just how well voice input worked, and if I used the feature enough, I’d have to put it under the good heading. However, that the keyboard isn’t responsive enough for me so I have to talk to the phone definitely counts as bad. I still think the default onscreen keyboard for Windows Phone 7.5 is better, and that the absolute best solution is a real keyboard.

For a revision with so much swiping, I was sad to see that the email and Gmail apps didn’t let me swipe to delete like in webOS. That would’ve been keen and fit with the rest of the  “swiping makes stuff go away” method that is all over this OS. I also hate that I continue to need a separate app for Google’s Mail client versus my personal mail. One mailbox to rule them all, Google!