As in Honeycomb, these Ice Cream Sandwich controls will fade in some apps to three points of light, until you tap them again. Below that, the three onscreen controls (a Honeycomb carryover) stand in for touch-sensitive buttons. Most of the time, a widget will resize when you drag it on the X or Y axis, but some widgets, like that for the photo gallery, don't resize.īeneath the home screen content, five icons lead you to the phone book, your contacts, the apps (this looks like BlackBerry's menu button), texting, and the browser. You can drag and drop them onto the home screen from the app tray (more later), and press and hold the widget to surface the selection handles. Resizable widgets are another Ice Cream Sandwich addition. The implementation is easy to use and looks terrific. You can create and name your own home screen folders by dragging app icons on top of one another. It's the first place you'll encounter a new typography called Roboto-it looks crisp and clean as promised, but unless you're looking for changes, most users won't notice a big difference.įrom the top to the bottom of the main home screen (there are five total), you see a transparent search bar, a stylized clock, and a round icon denoting a folder that's been prefilled with Google services. Right off the bat, the default home screen is just gorgeous. Yet, there's also a side of Ice Cream Sandwich that suffers from conflicting design ideologies, like a Honeycomb Mini that's also trying to make sense as a smartphone OS. Most of these themes appear again and again in the native apps, from Maps to the browser. Just look to the new menu button and menu lists, the redesigned notifications pull-down, the highly organized settings menu, and the photo-editing Gallery app for examples. Much of the new look is simple, elegant, grown-up, and, dare I say, sexy. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of additions and enhancements that make Ice Cream Sandwich more powerful in the aggregate, but I'd be hard-pressed to pick a single game-changing addition, apart from the wild new look.įrom a design position, the success of ICS varies more. The functionality of Gingerbread and Honeycomb is there, and in fact, the entire OS is more of a front-end overhaul of the OS' design and organization than it is a cavalcade of hard-hitting features. From a features standpoint, it seems to work. Google's goal: to unify the smartphone and tablet form factors, so that Android looks like Android on any screen size. Instead, it blends many Android Honeycomb tablet sensibilities-the navigation buttons, tabs for recent apps, darker colors, and more assertive look-with reworked Android flair. Google has all but transformed the visuals, leaving almost no screen as it was before. Say goodbye to the Android you thought you knew.
0 kommentar(er)
