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Top 3 Design Improvements in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
Google's latest update to its world-famous Android mobile operating system includes not just a strengthening of the operating system itself but also an overall redesign of the elements in its interface.

If you loved the easy and user-friendly interface of either Android 2.3 Gingerbread or Android 3.0 Honeycomb, you will also love the brand new improvements in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, which supposedly includes the best elements of Gingerbread and Honeycomb.

Here are the three top design improvements that Google implemented in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

Typography That's Easy on the Eyes

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich will enchant users having an Android that is completely redone and made over--starting with its typeface called Roboto, which is used all over the various screens and widgets.

Roboto is a sans-serif typeface introduced in the most recent Android 4.0 operating system. Google described it as a "modern, yet approachable" font. Despite having been criticized for imitating more popular and well-established typefaces such as Helvetica, Univers, or Myriad, the new typeface in ICS does make reading text easy on an Android smartphone.

It is the very typeface that appears in Ice Cream Sandwich's magazine-type design ethos--big pictures, bold headlines, lots of resting spaces for the eyes (called "white space" in publication parlance).

The Lock Screen in Android 4.0, for example, reeks of Roboto throughout. read more is in Roboto. The day, date, and charging information come in Roboto. Roboto is splattered all over Ice Cream Sandwich. Apart from Roboto on the Lock Screen, Google has also updated the live wallpaper on the lock screen--it now shows rich but subtle animations of blue orbs rising skywards.

New Home Screen

In any Android smartphone or tablet, the Home screen is w here everything begins. Unlocking the phone brings you to the Home screen, with an analog clock in the center of the screen and some virtual buttons below. Ice Cream Sandwich supplies a new, innovative way to interact with these devices. Virtual buttons have already been integrated into the machine, and they hide when they know they are unnecessary. Thus, you get a bigger viewing area with those buttons out of way as you browse the Web together with your Android phone or while watching movies or videos.

The Home screen isn't just the place to start from where you could run your applications. It is also a place for the widgets, giving you usage of important information with no need to go anywhere. And, widgets in ICS, just like in Honeycomb are resizable. You can make them as large as you want, or as small as you want. They're your widgets, and Android 4.0 allows you to have your way using them.

Adding widgets in ICS can be faster and easier. With the widget tab, you can easily locate your widgets, or pick and drag the ones that you would like to drop on your own Home screen. With better widgets, ICS offers you that breath of oxygen in terms of adding your individual touch and customizing your Android phone and its own Home screen.

Folders and Favorites Tray

You can think about folders as containers, exactly like real-life folders, that allow you to group and organize printed documents. In get more info , it is possible to group your preferred apps, contacts, and more into folders. All it takes is dragging and dropping icons from another folder to another. Easy breezy organization and management with folders.

Also, with Android 4.0, now you can customize your Favorites Tray in the bottom of the screen. Assuming you have placed your favorite apps inside one folder, and you also want them to be instantly accessible regardless of which screen you're viewing, just place them in the Favorites Tray.

These three design features are not just eye candy. They are meant to be functional improvements whose chief goal would be to make Android 4.0 easier and more pleasurable to use. With these improvements in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, users of Android smartphones and Android tablets are certain to get the very best of both Gingerbread and Honeycomb.

Eager to know more about Android smartphones and Android tablets? Or, perhaps, you already own one and wish to know what else that intelligent device can do to make your daily life slightly bit short of paradise? Get some TidBits of Android news
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