Google I/O certainly didn’t disappoint this year, with a heavy emphasis on the Android platform showing exactly where Google’s priorities lie. One of the main talking points was the unveiling of Ice Cream Sandwich – the next and most exciting version of the Android OS yet. Here’s how it’ll stack up to Honeycomb.
Google’s Mike Claren officially announced Ice Cream Sandwich (along with a neat new logo that makes me hungry every time I look at it) and labelled it the company’s “most ambitious release to date.” It won’t be shipping until the end of the year, so precise feature lists and even images were not forthcoming, but Claren did set out the new OS’s key attributes.
Suffice to say, Ice Cream Sandwich looks set to render Google’s current showcase Android OS, the tablet-bound Honeycomb, obsolete. Here’s how.
One OS for every device
“We want one OS that runs everywhere.” That’s Google’s thinking with Ice Cream Sandwich, as related by Mike Claren. Ask anyone – from fan to rival – what Android’s key weakness is and 90 per cent will come back at you with an ‘F’ word – fragmentation.
Android’s open source nature and inherent flexibility means it appears of a huge range of devices, including various smartphones and tablets. While this is the key to Android’s success, it also means that it lacks the unified app environment of Apple’s iOS. Ice Cream Sandwich will go some way to alleviating that because it will unify the two separate strands that have developed – smartphone and tablet.
Put simply, then, ICS will be like a super-scalable version of Honeycomb, capable of running on dual-core tablets and budget smartphones alike.
Just like Honey(comb)
Part of Ice Cream Sandwich’s task will be to bring the best bits of Honeycomb to smartphones. There are plenty of excellent design advances made in the tablet OS that could easily make the trip to the smaller screen – particularly the ones with similar dual-core processors.
Mike Claren confirmed some of the Honeycomb features that would make their way onto smartphone courtesy of Ice Cream Sandwich. For one thing, Honeycomb’s attractive ‘Holographic UI’ – or in plain English that attractive 3D interface that makes menu items feel so chunky and solid – will make the switch (if in a downscaled format), as will as other UI elements like the launcher and the Recent Apps multi-tasking menu.
Android smartphone users running on ICS will also be able to make use of those so-called “richer widgets,” as Claren puts it, which make Honeycomb’s front-end such a pleasure to use.
In all of this, elements like the action bar will intelligently scale according to the size of the device, so handset manufacturers won’t have to do any fiddling to get Ice Cream Sandwich running on non-tablet handsets.
Interesting new features
Ice Cream Sandwich won’t just trump Honeycomb through flexibility, though. There’ll be a host of new capabilities baked into it, some of which were touched upon during the opening Google I/O keynote. For one thing the already-impressive Honeycomb UI will be improved for all devices. In fact, Claren referred to it as a “State of the art UI.” For another, there’ll be a bunch of new APIs for developers to make use of.
The ones that were demonstrated at Google I/O made use of the Android device’s camera. One demonstration showed how head-tracking would be possible in ICS, the front camera using the movements of the user’s head to adjust the perspective on a 3D scene.
Another demonstration showed how facial recognition would be a part of ICS. The application shown notes where your facial features (eyes, ears, nose etc) are and lets you manipulate a live feed of your face in real time. It’s a trivial application, but the fact that the system understands how your face is mapped out has some awesome implications. Finally, a “virtual camera operator” app was shown running, which caused the front camera to focus in on whoever was speaking within its field of vision during a video chat.
All of these new features show that Ice Cream Sandwich is going to do more than just unite the two strands of Android OS that have developed. It’ll be significantly smarter and more aware of its surroundings than the current king, Honeycomb. We look forward to the innovative applications this will inevitably lead to come Q4.
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