The Mega-Video: What’s New In Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0)?

Sure, other sites might have footage of Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0.) They grabbed a Galaxy Nexus, fumbled with it for a second or two, and then shot 2-3 minutes of video with a device/interface they weren’t really familiar with. And that’s fine.

But I didn’t want to do that — I wanted us to do it right. Late last night, I caught up with Android’s Engineering Director Dave Burke for an in-depth, 15 minute video showing the full array of Ice Cream Sandwich’s finest features.

Want to skip around a bit? Only care about one or two features? I’ve broken down the timestamps below, so feel free to scrub the timeline.

0:00 : The Galaxy Nexus Hardware
0:37 : Android 4.0′s New Look and Design Theory
1:25 : New, resizable widgets
2:01 : Improved keyboard (with spellcheck)
2:30 : On-the-fly speech-to-text conversion*
3:51 : The New Browser (Improved tab browsing/Offline browsing/”Request desktop site” button)
5:18 : The New Gmail
6:10 : Folders
6:55 : The New Camera (Touch to focus, rapid-fire photos)
7:40 : On-device photo editing
8:06 : Panoramic photograph mode (with auto stitching)
9:02 : 1080p video recording
9:25 : Facial Recognition screen unlock*
11:06: The new look of “Books” (and the context sensitive onscreen buttons)
11:45: The new recent apps carousel (with swipe-to-close gestures)
12:15: The on-device data usage monitor
13:50: Android Beam (Device-to-device content sharing)*

(Sections with *’s are those that are particularly awesome and absolutely worth watching even if you don’t have time for the whole thing)

You might recognize this video from our hands-on impressions last night — but given just how much is really shown off here, we figured the video was worth breaking out of that wall of text.

Crunchbase

• ANDROID

Product: Android

Website: code.google.com

Company Google

Android is a software platform for mobile devices based on the Linux operating system and developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance. It allows developers to write managed code in Java that utilizes Google-developed software libraries, but does not support programs developed in native code. The unveiling of the Android platform on 5 November 2007 was announced with the founding of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 34 hardware, software and telecom companies devoted to advancing open standards...

→ Learn more