Android 4.0 – the Ice Cream Sandwich has arrived

The long awaited Android Ice Cream Sandwich is finally out and based on first looks, it’s well worth the wait. There are a few major improvements and a lot of minor ones. The most important change is perhaps the fact, that it’s intended for both tablets and smartphones, which will greatly reduce the fragmentation. It also allows for hardware acceleration for the 2D graphics, which means there should be no lag at all in the menus and so on.

The interface is a mix of Honeycomb and Gingerbread and now includes on-screen buttons, which make the device look very good when the screens off (and we all know design is one of the most important things, when buying a new phone). Multitasking has been improved and now looks more like the card-interface in webOS. There are a lot of other improvements and cool new features in the camera, notifications, calendar, browser – basically everywhere. The update is supposed to be released for the Nexus S first and then for the RAZR (in early 2012). Other devices, which will support it haven’t been announced, but according to Google, any device running 2.3 should should also be capable of running 4.0. B. A.