Google and Samsung – A new look at what’s new from Android (Live)
- It’s called the Galaxy Nexus and it runs Android 4.0, called Ice Cream Sandwich or ICS.
- It has NFC, an LED, and a barometer. 
- ICS has a completely new font called Roboto, designed for HD, high-res screens.
- The Galaxy Nexus has no buttons. That helps to unify ICS with tablets, I’m guessing.
- Widgets are now resizeable.
- Folders are now as simple as dragging and dropping icons on top of each other.
- Woohoo! ICS gets easy screenshots. Just press volume-down and power.
- It’s easy to flick notifications out of the way. This really takes notifications to the next level. You can also reach notifications from the lock screen.
- We just a demo of real, natural speech input with pauses as the person thinks. This will be pretty huge.
- ICS also introduces a way to unlock your phone with your face.
- You can save a page in the browser for off-line viewing (e.g. for boarding passes).
- Demo of Gmail app. A new “action bar” shows the buttons for common actions.
- You can swipe to move through inbox just like you can swipe away notifications.
- Demo of Calendar app. The same swiping gesture works. You can pinch in or out.
- New feature: data usage. You can set warnings or hard caps. You can slice/dice by day and see which apps used the most data. You can then disable background data for individual apps.
- Android Beam – The new way to share!! Just one tap share
- SDK is available at http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html
About the Author
thoughts:
1. glossed over camera quality. Resolution isn’t everything. Tell me about the lense. Also, I don’t do much video shooting on the smartphone.
2. Screen looks impressive, but again…perhaps a bit too large?
3. NFC Beam — I think this is going to be fairly pointless. I don’t see too many of my friends picking this up, both of us being in the same place, and sharing a website or an app link. Sorry.
4. Many of the UI overhauls look fantastic. Fonts, animations, etc. Is the focus a page out of the Windows 7/8 theme? Love the new notifications option
5. Facelock: interesting, but unnecessary and gimmicky.
6. Social integration looks nice.
7. The data usage monitor and settings will be a huge seller in today’s market.
Being an owner of the Nexus One and Nexus S, I’m going to have to get my paws on this one to make a decision. Ultimately, I may switch to an iPhone 4S for these reasons: camera quality, long-time OSX user cloud integration, and Siri.
I’m reserving judgment until I do a full test of both units.
What about pricing? That should be interesting.
I think samsung couldve done a much better design.. The back looks cheap plasticky and ugly, the headphone jack at the bottom??? that’s soo awkward :/ and that camel hump looks uncomfortable to hold. oh well.. lets leave the next nexus up to motorola.. I cant wait for the next iteration of nexus.. A full google android phone.. I think samsung has reached it height for a while.. especially after realizing that copying apple isnt worth it anymore, and one more thing.. this quote??? “The reason for this decision, Google tells us, is that the company believes it knows how to manage apps’ resource usage and doesn’t want you to ever worry about “killing” them.” Isn’t that something Steve Jobs said???.. Why is google still copying ios.. they should spin off and make their own niche market.. they’ve beat ios in market share.. in any case though, I think it’s safe to say that I was a little underwhelmed with this, and am going to just buy an unlocked iphone 4s. Im not a fanboy, But a consumer looking for the most bang for my buck. ANDROID and SAMSUNG have yet to satisfy me.
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, I think apple´s big square icons are quite ugly. Windows UI is too simple. I like Android, I like widgets, I like having everything just “there” and this phone looks awesome, and so does ICS.
ewwww, look at that clucker fuck of a UI. Sure, give us a calender widget, but we have to resize it? Everything look so messy and laggy. But I think that’s just a feature of android anyway.
the iPhone 4s still beats it even though ice cream sandwich was built for that phone
Wait, that’s it? I was expecting some game-changing features, but this is just a disappointment.
The entire OS looks very modern. It’s overly techy/modern on the home screens, but once you start diving in to the google apps and such it’s really, really nice. Look at their recent overhaul of online stuff. It’s clean and simple. That was translated over from Honeycomb, and it’s now ICS. If you hate the homescreen look (which I kind of do), then just change it. It’s that easy. Looking into the apps though, it looks like they really did a lot of good changes to the OS.
Yeah, just like the iPhone. It’s 2011 and it still doesn’t have 4G connectivity. That is absolutely unacceptable. Oh, wait. iPhone users will accept anything, so I guess it’s okay.
I’ll take a split-second lag over a 16-month re-release of a 2010 i-product any day.
“That having been said, it unfortunately remains the case that Android isn’t as swift and responsive as iOS or Windows Phone (or even MeeGo Harmattan on the N9). Or at least it wasn’t on the demo phone we got a look at. The subtle, pervasive lag that has characterized the Android UI since it inception is still there, which is not a heartening thing to hear when you’re talking about a super-powered dual-core device like the Galaxy Nexus.”
How is Android STILL lagging at this stage :/
So now where are all the people who said that ICS was going to bring hardware Acceleration to Android and totally going to kill everything else on the market. This is just not acceptable at all.
As the very first phone to showcase the Android 4.0, it features a completely “ redesigned user interface with improved multi-tasking, notifications, Wi-Fi hotspot, NFC support and a full web browsing experience” with the intent of making using the Android phone simpler and more useful.
Here are some of my impressions and expectations for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich:
- This means Samsung can maybe “easily” update processor speed to 1.5Ghz and maybe also later to the OMAP4470 1.8Ghz when those faster OMAP4 processors become available.
- I don’t know how fast Samsung can manufacture these screens and how much it costs them, my guess is this screen is the most expensive Super AMOLED yet, and I guess that Super AMOLED is already quite a bit more expensive than LCD and I wonder if Samsung is able to manufacture enough of these screens to not create major shortages for the availability of this Galaxy Nexus worldwide for the months to come. If there is one phone worth queuing up for if you want to be sure to get one in the first weeks/months at release, this may be it.
- They haven’t yet shown what happens when you connect to HDTV output, I wonder if the “pins” on the side provide HDMI and data output/input or/and if an MHL connector takes care of this like on the Samsung Galaxy S2. I expect the full Motorola Atrix type Laptop Dock, Desktop Dock, Multimedia Dock, all those features are likely part of Android 4.0, which is why I think Ice Cream Sandwich means the merger of Android with Chrome OS and Google TV.
- Samsung Galaxy Nexus is likely going to be expensive. This is not news though for high-end smartphones, those are all ridiculously expensive today. But that’s just how things are, and they are able to sell tens of millions at those expensive prices. Consider that you are paying $2000 to $3000 for this phone with a 2 year contract. Considering the possibility that Samsung may not be able to manufacture enough of those 720p HD Super AMOLED screens, they may even purposefully increase the price even further at launch.