Hmm, I think some of the threads didn't make the cut. My old ICS/Galaxy Nexus thread is nowhere to be found. Anyhow, I was able to play with it a bit (phone and tablet version). A lot of things just rolled over from honeycomb (with some slight visual changes) so if you own or played on a honeycomb tablet, you'll be familiar with some of the changes. The notification pulldown is the most useful change for me so far. It's turned into one of the most powerful things on android in the last few updates. Before, you'd have to rely on apps, rom devs, and oems to make some decent usage of it such as widget toggles, quick settings, music playback controls, etc. Google finally decided to have their own useful settings in it now. There's a settings button in the notification pulldown now that rotates through your notifications, notification widgets, volume/media controls, and battery profile. But who the hell knows if the majority of android users will ever see this if they don't own a Nexus phone since oem's will be doing their own things with overlays. Speaking of which.. so Google finally decided to have media playback controls in the notification pulldown. This was one of my most anticipated features as I always wondered why nobody has done this for the longest time. It's common sense to have such a feature along with the controls on the lockscreen. Google Music finally supports this on ICS But then I noticed the Samsung Music player.. Samsung made a music app doing the exact same thing in Gingerbread well before ICS. That kind of makes me mad that Google would fragment their music app like that in its own OS. Anyhow, on to the tablet version of the browser. It's pretty damn hot. I won't embed this image since the forum doesn't resize it. http://i.imgur.com/dVLah.png I've never used the honeycomb browser, but the ICS one is actually a respectable tablet browser. It keeps tabs up top wherever you are on the webpage, unlike Dolphin HD where you have to scroll back to top to access the tabs. Plus, you can tap the tab to get quick access to the address bar (instead of scrolling to top). And don't forget that the ICS browser now syncs with your Chrome bookmarks. Also, adjusting your volume from your volume rockers will allow you to hit settings from the OSD for quick access to the notification alert volume control. For some reason, stock won't allow you to have your ringtone and notification volumes the same. Google+ for ICS allows you to sync those contacts. This means that you can finally have high resolution contact photos. This is assuming you actually have friends on Google+
There are some experimental versions of ICS for my phone on XDA, but I think I'm going to hold off for a stable version of CM9.
Indeed. My friend has a captivate too, and tried it out for a day or two. He had to restore back to his stable rom. The experimental ICS build he tried out seemed good enough for a daily initially but didn't cut it after spending some time with it.
I installed CM9 Alpha 5 ICS on my old Galaxy-S 1. This is a pretty solid OS that seems to run smoother than 2.2/2.3 ever did. Need to play around with some of the ICS only stuff yet.
Sony let us play with a beta version of their ICS rom which has some stuff certified like wifi and stuff. Not long to go until an official release
Got a very stable version of ICS running on my Galaxy S2 - super quick and responsive again. Gingerbread was really starting to piss me off.
CM9 is in the experimental phase for my phone, but this is still a massive improvement over Gingerbread. I think with ICS, Android is finally on par with the iPhone in terms of its interface. It's clean and intuitive and very responsive. Chrome is probably the best mobile browser I've used.
I think as far as interface goes, even froyo and gingerbread were fine. The stock launcher's options and design were pretty ugly, yea, but a new launcher could fix plenty of it. As a matter of fact, if you were saying stock android now at 4.0 is on par with ios' design quality, I'll agree with you. Now with ICS, Google finally has a theme that devs are willing to follow. I'm beginning to see a bunch of app devs putting the holo theme in their apps. It also looks like more are following Google's app guidelines by including an action bar and whatnot. The issue I have is that I don't know why it took so long to happen. Android is about 3.5yrs old since the first android phone came out. I guess that's the problem when you have and give alot of freedom in your ecosystem. One of my favorite RSS readers, Feedly (also available on ios), has one of the best app designs I've seen yet in all of the android apps I've tried so far (second to poweramp). It has also worked flawlessly ever since I've used it. Then you have apps like Facebook for Android which I have no idea what those clowns are doing.
I agree. ICS is the direction Android has needed to go in for a long time, and I'm really not sure why it took so long. I also don't know why it took so long to get a mobile version of Chrome. That being said, ICS and mobile Chrome are both pretty awesome. It will be interesting to see what things are like going forward now that iOS and Android are on a pretty level playing field.
Vodafone are releasing ICS for the Galaxy SII tomorrow. It does annoy me that the phone companies take so long to get the updates out there but the bigger ones like Vodafone and O2 do seem to at least make some effort. A friend at work is on Virgin Media and it took them 6 months + to release Gingerbread for his old HTC Desire. He has an SII now but god only knows when VM will release ICS for it!
To be fair, he should feel quite fortunate that his phone even got gingerbread. HTC wasn't even planning on updating it to gingerbread since they knew it would have issues. Then due to the backlash from customers, they decided to go for it. There was a long list of potential issues they warned customers about upon release. http://www.engadget.com/2011/08/01/htc-desire-gingerbread-update-available-but-you-have-to-really/