Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich

[gorilla]

Android 4.0 for Users
Simple, beautiful, beyond smart
Android 4.0 builds on the things people love most about Android — easy multitasking, rich notifications, customizable home screens, resizable widgets, and deep interactivity — and adds powerful new ways of communicating and sharing.
Android 4.0 was announced over night and will merge the phone and tablet OS bringing the following new or improved features:

Refined, evolved UI
Multitasking
Home screen folders and favorites tray
Resizable widgets
New lock screen actions
Quick responses for incoming calls
Swipe to dismiss notifications, tasks, and browser tabs
Improved text input and spell-checking
Powerful voice input engine
Control over network data
Designed for accessibility
People and profiles
Unified calendar, visual voicemail
Rich and versatile camera capabilities
Redesigned Gallery app with photo editor
Live Effects for transforming video
Sharing with screenshots
Powerful web browsing (bookmarks sync with chrome!)
Improved email
Android Beam for NFC-based sharing
Face Unlock
Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth HDP

New Developer Features
Unified UI framework for phones, tablets, and more
Android 4.0 brings a unified UI framework that lets developers create elegant, innovative apps for phones, tablets, and more. It includes all of the familiar Android 3.x interface elements and APIs — fragments, content loaders, Action Bar, rich notifications, resizable home screen widgets, and more — as well as new elements and APIs.

For developers, the unified UI framework in Android 4.0 means new UI tools, consistent design practices, simplified code and resources, and streamlined development across the range of Android-powered devices.

I think this looks like a good step forward, similar to honeycomb in many ways but still a big improvement over gingerbread.
The improved camera will be a welcome benefit to us all.

The update will begin rolling out sometime in November, but I figure that custom ROMs will also appear before the end of November.

See the full release notes at http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-4.0-highlights.html#UserFeatures

[Hands0n]

Finally, I think that Android has managed to get me just a little bit excited. It all went wrong for me in Eclair, the successor to Donut, and never really recovered. Gingerbread is okay, but doesn't really float too many of my boats.

ICS, on the other hand, sees Android finally grow up and give iOS a bit of a shoulder barge. Will it stack up in reality? I really do not know, but it is encouraging to read that Android, finally, starts to make use of the handset's GPU as a hardware accelerator generally, something iOS has been doing for quite some time.

Having retired my Nexus S I am hopeful to see ICS on the Galaxy S 2, most particularly in Cyanogen flavour. I'm not sure I'll be too happy to put the Samsung ROM back on the device, not unless they've eschewed Touchwiz, which I very much doubt.

Loving what I see of ICS in the videos and spec sheets. The Galaxy Nexus is obviously the showcase for the new OS and nice it looks too.

[Wilt]

The data management looks really good. Not really a headline feature, but an incredibly important one. Hopefully it will allow people to feel a little better about using mobile data. Pity it is the OS vendors which are forced to do something about this though, and not the network operators.

I either missed it or they didn't mention it in the presentation, is the visual voicemail dependent on Google Voice? Hopefully not, I like hullomail but would be nice to have something integrated into the device that can be used over here.

[miffed]

If there is one thing Android excels at , it is disappointing me with major releases ! [:)]

Call me ignorant , but I could barely tell the difference between Froyo on my Dell streak and Gingerbread on Nexus S ..... and before that I noticed little difference between 2.2 and 2.1 ...... I think the only increment that made me "smile" was 1.6 to 2.1 on the Streak.
I have no experience of honeycomb at all , so hopefully with 4.0 I'll actually be able to tell I am using something new for a change !

[gorilla]

Dear miffed, tut tut :) I'm struggling to give people reasons to upgrade to iOS 5 so it's not that unusual.
For anyone on anything lower than 2.3 the change to ICS will be dramatic. For those that have customised their phone and run 2.3.x the difference won't appear that much. Switching apps is much prettier - you get a nice tiled viewed that you can swipe (scroll) through.

I'm also interested in the GPU hardware accelerator support. We all know that a lot of Android phones are shipped with impressive specs, so maybe now we'll see some performance improvements.

[Ben]

Dear miffed, tut tut :) I'm struggling to give people reasons to upgrade to iOS 5 so it's not that unusual.
I was going to stay off this thread but... you can NOT be serious!

:p

[gorilla]

I'm deadly serious. Maybe it's just because I have an iPad, but I'm not really noticing much difference.
What's the big improvement for you? Wrong thread I know, but at least we can debate the merits of a new OS.
These latest releases aren't exactly setting the world on fire, but I do know that android 4.0 will be an improvement over 2.3 especially for those of us that have newish hardware.

[Ben]

You're right, it's less of a big deal on the iPad, but the new notifications system is a dramatic improvement on the smaller screen of the iPhone. All the OTA stuff (inc iCloud) for purchases/backups/iTunes sync is a big step up, the improved lock screen notifications and camera access + hardware shutter button, iMessage (that's a biggie, especially on iPad). I think they're the big ones for me.