Android: Ice Cream Sandwich

On the left is the new homescreen, with the new resizable, scrollable widgets from Honeycomb. On the right is the new "People" app, showing your contacts in big, pretty, Windows-Phone-like boxes.

Google

Last night, Google introduced the newest version of Android, to be called Ice Cream Sandwich. It's easily the biggest update to Android in years, combining elements of the tablet-only Honeycomb with a whole bunch of new ideas, and a firm focus on cohesion--a major complaint about Android. Google also showed off the new Samsung-made Nexus flagship phone, and it is a monster: a 4.65-inch screen in full 720p resolution, and no buttons at all.

Ice Cream Sandwich--Google names its Android versions alphabetically after desserts, so ICS follows Honeycomb, Gingerbread, and Froyo--is, as promised, a melding of the tablet-only Honeycomb into the smartphone versions. To that end, Google has gotten rid of the traditional back, menu, home, and search buttons: in ICS, those will be dynamic and on the display itself, so they can change to suit your needs at that moment. The overall look of the OS is much more flat and stark than before, a little like Microsoft's Windows Phone but with a blue tint.

Other major changes: there's a new font (this is a bigger deal than you think), a new browser that syncs with your computer's Chrome browser and Instapaper-like offline reading, a camera Google promises takes pictures instantly, new editing abilities for both stills and videos, and a magazine-style "People" app that shows your contacts at their prettiest. The notifications and multitasking have also been completely redone, and they look oddly like those of WebOS, the recently deceased mobile OS by Palm--not too surprising, actually, given that they were designed by Matias Duarte, one of the creators of WebOS. Running apps show up in a vertical list. Tapping them takes you into the app, or swiping them horizontally closes them. That same swiping action dismisses notifications from the pull-down notification shade.

That's not even to mention all the little features buried in Android, including some very cool ones like a facial recognition unlocker that unlocks your phone simply by looking at it, or a built-in barometer (!) in addition to the standard accelerometer and GPS. Or the continuing push for NFC.

As they always have, Google also showed off a new "Nexus" phone, the first phone to pack the new operating system, and the one that's supposed to set the pace for this generation of Android phones. This time it's the Samsung-made Galaxy Nexus. It's got a full HD screen, meaning 1280 by 720 pixels. That's legit HD, not "looks HD," not marketing speak. Admittedly, those pixels have a lot of room to breathe, since the Galaxy Nexus has a frankly ridiculous 4.65-inch screen. That is huge. The iPhone's got a 3.5-incher, standard Windows Phones and Androids have a 4-inch, and the biggest mainstream phones, like the HTC Thunderbolt, have 4.3-inchers. 4.65 is getting into pocket-stretching territory. The Galaxy Nexus will be the first phone to have ICS, and rumors suggest it'll come out on Verizon sometime in November, possibly at a $300 price point.

[via Gizmodo]

Google Galaxy Nexus

Google

Buried in the avalanche of features in the newest version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich, was the addition of a new sensor to accompany the standard GPS, proximity, and accelerometer: a barometer. It's one we'd never have thought to add to a smartphone, and we sat for a little while, scratching our heads at the possible use for a sensor that tests atmospheric pressure. So we talked to the experts over at Weather Underground, and got a better sense of what this is--and, more importantly, what it is not.

WHAT'S A BAROMETER?

A barometer is an instrument used primarily to test atmospheric pressure--essentially the weight of air. Invented way back in the 17th century, barometers now come in a few different forms. There's the water-based kind, very similar to the original invention: a sealed glass container with a narrow spout, half full of liquid. Then there's the aneroid barometer, which uses a small cell made of a beryllium/copper alloy that expands or contracts based on atmospheric pressure. But the most modern, smallest barometers, the kind almost certainly used in the new Galaxy Nexus phone, are digital.

Digital barometers are tiny--they're often found in dedicated GPS units and even in those rugged outdoorsy watches--and replace all mechanical parts with a simple pressure-sensing transducer, which measure pressure in Pascals. Of course, these digital barometers have to be calibrated to deliver an accurate reading; you somehow have to be able to give the barometer a constant that is correct. Often that's done by entering your precise elevation, though over time the barometer will suss out the correct readings.

WHY IS IT IN MY PHONE?

I spoke to Jeff Masters, the director of meteorology at Weather Underground, to find out why Google might have chosen to include this surprising sensor in their new flagship phone. His immediate answer? Altitude. "I would expect," he said, "someone will write an app to determine your change in altitude based on your barometer reading." This could be of a lot of use to hikers who want to see how many feet they've climbed, or people curious to find out the pressure inside a train or plane. The phone's always-on internet connection would allow some sharing and crowdsourcing of data, as well. "It would also be cool if you could share your pressure readings with a bunch of other smartphone users to get a super-dense picture of the pressure changes due to an approaching thunderstorm, cold front, or hurricane," says Masters.

But the main use for a barometer is a lot simpler, and a lot more subtle. Says John Celenza, the lead meteorological developer at Weather Underground, "the barometer is probably used on the phone to aid in correcting altitude measurements by the GPS." In other words, the barometer is more likely than not intended to be a source of supplemental data for the GPS sensor, adding altitude measurements for increased accuracy. The atmospheric pressure is directly related to elevation, so a barometer can very easily be used as an altimeter, measuring your altitude.

WHAT CAN'T IT DO?

Our immediate thought upon hearing that Google was implanting a barometer in smartphones was a revolution in weather forecasting. It'd be like a meteorologist, right in your phone! That weather app of yours would get a shot in the arm of pure, hard data, based on exactly where you are, not the closest weather station. You'd be able to crowdsource weather readings to find out what the weather is all around you!

Those are a bit optimistic, it turns out. According to Celenza, "barometric pressure does not change greatly over a small geographic area. For instance, when people calibrate their weather station barometer, they use the nearest airport's barometric pressure reading." The barometric pressure is unlikely to change very much even over several miles, in terms of assisting with weather prediction. "We do not immediately see," said Celenza, "how having a fine-grid of barometric pressure readings is going to substantially help forecasting." So you can forget about having a tiny meteorologist in your pocket.

WHAT ABOUT THE FUTURE?

This isn't to say that the barometer could never be used for all those cool weather forecasting dreams we had. In concert with a few more sets of data, a phone equipped with a barometer really could deliver accurate forecasts for your specific time and place. "If phones could somehow accurately sense temperature, wind speed, and direction, that would be a game-changer," says Celenza. Many smartphones already pack an internal thermometer to sense and regulate the phone's guts--it's not very far-fetched at all to imagine an external thermometer that could measure the outside air.

Wind speed and direction, well, that's a bit harder. The bulky anemometer, invented way back in 1450, is still in wide use, and as a large mechanical device would be pretty hard to translate to a digital form. But there are already wind sensors for our smartphones--apps that use a phone's microphone to hear wind speed. Direction could be sussed out from the phone's position (use the GPS and gyroscope for that), and the microphone can measure speed.

All in all, it's not hard to imagine an all-in-one solution that puts a miniaturized weather station right in your smartphone. And a huge grid of to-the-second weather information could be a pretty amazing resource.

Galaxy Nexus Homescreen

Dan Nosowitz

Here's the thing about the Galaxy Nexus: It is the best Android phone available now by such a huge margin that I am prepared to say that shoppers should either buy it or steer clear of Android entirely. And that has nothing to do with its hardware.

I am putting forth a call to arms: Let us not care so much about hardware, Android friends. Let us not pay mind to mobile processor clock speed, to millimeters of body thickness, to HDMI-out ports and docking stations and removable batteries. The Galaxy Nexus is the best Android phone because its software was designed for humans. More than any other 'Droid previous, using the Galaxy Nexus just makes sense. And for that we can thank its stock install of something called Ice Cream Sandwich.

WHAT'S NEW

The Nexus line is Google's "reference line" of Android phones—each one (this is the third) is the first phone to carry the new version of Android, completely unencumbered by the custom interfaces tacked on by most other manufacturers. They're intended to be the purest version of Android of their generation. The Galaxy Nexus is the first with Android 4.0, called "Ice Cream Sandwich," or ICS (Android code names use alphabetical dessert names—Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, etc). More phones with ICS will come, and soon—and they will have skins, like HTC's Sense UI. But this is the phone Google wants us to think of when we think of ICS.

Ice Cream Sandwich is easily the biggest update to the smartphone version of Android since the original Droid's Android 2.0. A lot has changed—too much to cover everything in detail. But sticking to the highlights:

The look of Android is quite different from before: it's now cool and blue, with spare lines and black backgrounds. There's a new, custom-made font. There are friendly animations. The buttons are completely different—instead of the traditional four Android buttons (Home, Menu, Search, and Back), there are...well, technically, there are none. The buttons have been moved to the screen itself, and shrunk to three: Home, Back, and Recent Apps. The camera app has been overhauled. All of the first-party apps, like Gmail and Maps, are new. Icons and folders are more three-dimensional. The keyboard is new. Google Plus is heavily integrated. The list could go on, but it won't, because it's long enough already.

WHAT'S GOOD

Just about everything listed in the section above is a good change. But more importantly, Ice Cream Sandwich comes very close, dangerously close, to the ethereal goal of "just working." It is fast and responsive as all hell. That is impressive technologically, but for humans, it's more important as an element of a phone that feels like it's working with you, not against you. There's no lag: when you swipe, it moves. This is not as easy as it sounds; I've always felt Android had a distinct lag between your finger and what was happening on screen, and throughout most of the Galaxy Nexus, that's now gone.

The new buttons are great; they save space, but they're also very functional, rotating when you want to rotate the screen, adding a menu button when you're using an app that needs one, disappearing when you're playing a game or watching a video.

Apple stole Android's swipe-down notifications shade in iOS5, and while Apple's is prettier, Ice Cream Sandwich seems to say "oh yeah? Enjoy the first generation. Here's what we've done with years of practice." There's an embedded settings button in the shade, so you can jump in there and turn Wi-Fi or Bluetooth on and off, or change your brightness, or whatever, in one tap. You can swipe notifications away one by one—just tap and toss them off the phone.

This animation comes from Matias Duarte, the user interface genius behind the beloved and now-extinct Palm Pre, who is now a design bigwig at Google. It is the perfect way to deal with things you don't want: it's like grabbing an unwanted piece of junk mail and pushing it off your desk. Now your desk is clean! That same UI trick pops up in a few other places, and it never fails to make your phone feel simultaneously intuitive and transparent, which is not an easy trick.

Galaxy Nexus Apps

On the left: the Recent Apps screen. You can swipe any of these apps to close them, or tap to switch to them. On the right is the app drawer; swiping horizontally browses through apps and widgets.

Dan Nosowitz

All the new apps are great; Android's biggest strength, I always thought, was its Google apps. Maps on Android is in a different league than anywhere else, as is Gmail. The browser has been redesigned, smartly. Tabs can be swiped-to-close, just like notifications or open apps. Pages are rendered very nicely (though I found the tap-to-zoom-in-on-text, as well as pinch-to-zoom, to be less reliable and natural than on the iPhone 4S). There's a mode to request the desktop, rather than mobile, version of a site—ideal for the sites that, frustratingly, don't provide such links for you. There's a "save for offline reading" mode so you can read longer stories later, even when you've got no wireless signal. Mobile Flash, recently shuttered by Adobe, is not currently available on ICS—it may come later, but I didn't miss it, even though it was occasionally nice to have the option.

The keyboard is great. I've used Android for a long time, with many different devices, and this is the first time I did not immediately download a better keyboard app from the Market. It's the right amount of sensitive, autocorrect is unobtrusive and helpful, and it gets what you're trying to say. Job well done, Android keyboard developers.

There are lots of nice little features, which you'll discover as you go, ranging from NFC to a new unlock mode that recognizes your face to a new People app that collects info from all your friends. There are tons of goodies in here which you'll discover as you use it.

THE HARDWARE

Is mediocre. Please, guys, no more cheap-feeling, lightweight plastic phones. The Galaxy Nexus is made by Samsung, and feels like the Galaxy S, or the Focus, or any other modern Samsung phone. It's wildly thin (maybe a hair thinner than the iPhone 4S at its thinnest point), but it's still light and plastic-y. It is not impossible to make great-looking and great-feeling phones that aren't the iPhone—just ask Nokia—but the Galaxy Nexus is just, you know, fine. When I reviewed the Nokia Lumia 800, I kept trying to get other people to hold it. "Feel how great it feels to feel!" I'd sputter. No such illiterate enthusiasm here. It's not bad either, just nothing special.

Galaxy Nexus Back

Dan Nosowitz

The screen warrants some talk. It's sized at 4.65-inches, which is just insanity. 4.3 inches has become the accepted size of a "big" phone, so I was positive a 4.65-incher would be unusable, but in fact the Galaxy Nexus as a whole is just slightly larger than a 4.3-inch phone like the Droid Bionic (pictured). Partly that's because a portion of the screen is devoted to the new "buttons," and partly it's because the phone has a pretty small bezel. It's still a little too big, I think—I'd have preferred a Nexus with a 4.3-inch screen that physically is much smaller—but aside from a couple stretches to tap something in the upper-left corner of the screen, I can proclaim the Galaxy Nexus usable for people with average-to-large hands. The extra space is nice for watching videos or reading Kindle books (suddenly a pleasant experience on a phone), and the screen itself is great: ICS mandates a true 720p resolution, and the Super AMOLED display is very clear, with some of the deepest blacks I've seen.

The camera's speed is unparalleled—it's very fast to shoot and then ready itself for the next shot, even faster than the iPhone 4S. But the sensor in the Galaxy Nexus itself is surprisingly bad. It's a 5MP shooter, and compared to photos from the iPhone 4S or even other Android phones like the Samsung Galaxy S II, I found the Nexus's shots washed out, fuzzy, and without detail. That's a hardware issue, I suppose. Bummer, though. Future Ice Cream Sandwich phones will hopefully use better sensors.

The Galaxy Nexus will be released on Verizon's network here in the States, and it'll boast 4G LTE, which is pretty killer. My review unit is on T-Mobile's HSPA+ network, so I can't make any judgment about the Nexus's 4G speeds or battery life (a constant concern with 4G phones). It won't have a slot for expandable memory (most Android phones do) and rumors indicate it'll probably have 32GB of internal storage on Verizon. Call quality on today's phones usually has more to do with the network than the phone itself, but the Galaxy Nexus I tested delivered stellar-sounding calls on T-Mobile.

WHAT'S BAD

Android is still not as streamlined as iOS or Windows Phone. Perhaps Android phone fans don't want it to be. Ice Cream Sandwich is a big step forward, but there are still elements that feel redundant or messy. Having three ways to do something doesn't make it easier to use; it makes it harder to learn the rules of the operating system, harder to understand why certain things work certain ways and thus harder to perform new actions for the first time, since you're not sure how it'll respond. Some apps require a menu button, which will pop up next to the Recent Apps button at the bottom right of the screen. Some don't need one. Some do, but you'll find it in the upper right corner instead. Ugh.

Sometimes you scroll through things vertically starting at the bottom (like in the Recent Apps list or browser tabs). Sometimes you scroll through things vertically starting at the top (like every other app ever, including contacts and music). But then the app drawer scrolls horizontally. Every single time I opened the app drawer, I tried to swipe it up, the way non-Samsung Android phones have always worked. Why, Google? Why change that?

Galaxy Nexus and Droid Bionic

On the left, the 4.3-inch-screened Motorola Droid Bionic. On the right, the 4.65-inch-screened Galaxy Nexus. The Nexus is barely larger, and actually thinner.

Dan Nosowitz

The home screen is my least favorite part of the entire OS: it not only permits messiness, it encourages it. There are still five home screens, and you can't change that number. I never saw the need for more than one or two; the complete list of apps is one tap away, so why do you need to litter five homescreens with widgets and multiple redundant shortcuts?

Android is powerful and flexible, yes. You can do all kinds of crazy things! But that's like saying a huge buffet is always better than a carefully composed dish from a chef. I don't want to make Android something it's not, and there are definitely times when it's thrilling to be able to make my phone look just the way I want it to, but some consistency and limits might help here.

And once you get away from the warm blue glow of Google's first-party apps, performance takes a hit. Scrolling is noticeably jerkier and less natural in non-Google apps. The app selection is still not very cohesive; it sounds like an unfair claim, but the majority of Android apps are not as pretty or as fun to use as those on Windows Phone or iOS. Functional, sure, and there are an awful lot of apps in the Market. But mostly they are not as good. (Examples: Rdio, Twitter, IMDb, Hulu Plus.) The Music app is still disappointing; I'm not sure what the problem is there, but Android's default music player has always been curiously ugly and un-fun to use to me. There are lots of replacements in the Market, luckily (I recommend Winamp, although the official Music app is the only one that integrates with Google Music's cloud-streaming storage feature).

THE PRICE

None of the principal folks involved with the Galaxy Nexus (that'd be Google, Samsung, and Verizon) have announced price or availability in the States. Good bet would be soon, though.

THE VERDICT

The Galaxy Nexus is the best Android phone I've ever used, heads and tails above anything else on the market. The speed, the new sleek blue-and-grayscale look, the new Google apps, the new and easier ways to manage what's happening on your phone—there's no contest. With Verizon's 4G, presuming the 4G doesn't reduce the Nexus's battery life to zero in a few hours, it'll be a damn fine phone, and not just for dedicated Androiders.

I love the direction Ice Cream Sandwich is going: toward a more consistent, simpler, more fun experience, while retaining that tinkerer's ability to do anything. Finding that balance is as hard as balancing an egg on its end; it may turn out to be impossible to please everyone. But I have no hesitation in recommending the Nexus if you're leaning toward or curious about Android. It makes other Android phones feel much older than their age, and I mean that in the best way.

Galaxy Nexus Homescreen

Dan Nosowitz

The Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the newest and best Android smartphone we've ever used (read our review here), had a few key facts kept under wraps for a surprisingly long time, most importantly price and release date. Official word just came in last night: the Nexus is on sale at Verizon stores today (Thursday), at a price of $300, all of which is about as expected.

The Nexus has 32GB of non-replaceable storage, so it's priced on par with phones like the iPhone 4S. You'll need a 4G plan, since the Nexus uses Verizon's frankly awesome 4G LTE network.

[Droid Life]