I'm sorry, but adding a dock to the bottom of the home screen (wherever did they come up with that?) with new butt ugly icons, making the Google search bar invisible, resizable widgets, and adding a more obvious task killer is only enough to make the most ardent fandroids happy. Regular people are going to see things like this, face unlock, and beam, and they are simply not going to be that impressed. The Galaxy Nexus is on track to be a non-starter like the rest of the Nexus line. The truth hurts.
This is the phone that will make me switch from my iPhone 4. It has everything I wanted. Apple is screwed. The iPhone4S was a huge disappointment with no 4G speed and still the super slow 3G, and no NFC. Goodbye Apple and good riddance.
I'm sorry, but adding a dock to the bottom of the home screen (wherever did they come up with that?) with new butt ugly icons, making the Google search bar invisible, resizable widgets, and adding a more obvious task killer is only enough to make the most ardent fandroids happy. Regular people are going to see things like this, face unlock, and beam, and they are simply not going to be that impressed. The Galaxy Nexus is on track to be a non-starter like the rest of the Nexus line. The truth hurts.
The only thing that hurts is my head after reading your response. You gloss over the least important new features with a negative tone, and completely ignore some of the more notable improvements that were made. The truth must be hurting you more than it hurts me.
Mark my words. Applying the WebOS card system to tabbed browsing is something people will be talking about once more people are using Android 4.0. Mobile tabbed browsing has seen little improvement, and no one has quite figured it out yet. It needed a visual method for scrolling between tabs and easily closing them. The uniformity between the task manager, notifications and browser tabs was a great idea, and I think it's very possible that this will become a part of the API that developers will be able to use in their own apps in the future.
Aside from the Task Manager and Quick Response, I didn't find that any of these new features were groundbreaking in any way, in fact, a lot of them are obligatory updates meant to keep Android competitive with the other platforms. What was most interesting to me was the importance they put on organization and integration. Apple seemed to be focusing on this in their recent press conference as well. It will be hard to tell if either of these companies will hit their mark in either of these areas, but I think we can all expect to see integration and organization features improve with the next versions of platforms. (iOS 6? Android: Chaco Taco?)
I'm actually getting a raging boner thinking about the possibilities of the task manager format becoming available in the API. I can see an immediate need for it in an office suite, to switch between open documents.
I never liked the Android platform, it doesn't not have a friendly interface compared with IOS of the Iphone. Hopefully Nokia will come up with interesting devices in cooperation with Microsoft this week which can offer a good alternative to Android and Ios phones. I am waiting for something new, something different and most of all more advanced.
Okay, you are looking for something more advanced, yet you want something as easy as dirt? That's a bit of a conundrum. That's just like a person dreaming of being a computer troubleshooter, and not wanting to have to learn anything about computers. IOS may be easy to use, but it is also disgustingly limited on what the user can do. Sorry, but if one had an iPhone with a limited data plan, then why in the hell would you want to have to use the cloud for all of the data that apple is too stingy to let you use?
I don't know how much simpler Android could be. Turn it on, press icons, open menu to find more icons, drag icons to desktop, find more apps in the market and press "install."
You know, just like any other computer interface we've been using for, oh, thirty years. Or, hey, like pretty much any other smartphone.
Great article. As a former webOS original Palm Pre owner/user, happy to see the card system being implemented in Android, along with swipe away. Mainly, what excites me is hardware acceleration. Hoping it'll make a drastic improvement on the lag perception on my Nexus S 4G.
I just can't find ANYTHING that could be remotely described as a full user guide for ICS. How can this possibly be? Google isn't short of a penny or two and they have a full development team on ICS. So how come the best I can find is little more than an overview of the features? I can't think of any other product be it hardware or software that doesn't come with documentation - it's part of the requirement for a professionally developed product isn't it?
Do we have to wait for an "Idiot's Guide to Android ICS" to appear?
I got a Transformer Prime recently which came with a user manual but of course this gave little info about the OS itself. Hopefully I'm missing something obvious but if so I must be remarkably blind and/or stupid.
The user manual for each Android device contains a full walkthrough. Android in and of itself is not an end-user product. The device that it runs on is, and each device may have something different to say about how their version of Android is supposed to work.
djmeph
Detroit Icrontian
Comments
The only thing that hurts is my head after reading your response. You gloss over the least important new features with a negative tone, and completely ignore some of the more notable improvements that were made. The truth must be hurting you more than it hurts me.
Mark my words. Applying the WebOS card system to tabbed browsing is something people will be talking about once more people are using Android 4.0. Mobile tabbed browsing has seen little improvement, and no one has quite figured it out yet. It needed a visual method for scrolling between tabs and easily closing them. The uniformity between the task manager, notifications and browser tabs was a great idea, and I think it's very possible that this will become a part of the API that developers will be able to use in their own apps in the future.
Aside from the Task Manager and Quick Response, I didn't find that any of these new features were groundbreaking in any way, in fact, a lot of them are obligatory updates meant to keep Android competitive with the other platforms. What was most interesting to me was the importance they put on organization and integration. Apple seemed to be focusing on this in their recent press conference as well. It will be hard to tell if either of these companies will hit their mark in either of these areas, but I think we can all expect to see integration and organization features improve with the next versions of platforms. (iOS 6? Android: Chaco Taco?)
You know, just like any other computer interface we've been using for, oh, thirty years. Or, hey, like pretty much any other smartphone.
It's not that complicated.
Do we have to wait for an "Idiot's Guide to Android ICS" to appear?
I got a Transformer Prime recently which came with a user manual but of course this gave little info about the OS itself. Hopefully I'm missing something obvious but if so I must be remarkably blind and/or stupid.
(Rant over)