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Google Rolls Out Official Android 4.0 ICS Update
dell623 writes "Google is rolling out an OTA upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich for the Nexus S. GSM versions can already be updated manually. An early review is largely positive and comments on the significant visual and performance improvements. The Nexus S upgrade allows for a direct comparison against Gingerbread on the same hardware, and the likely improvement in current phones that will receive the upgrade."
With the death of the Android Update Alliance that promised timely updates for Android devices, it'll probably be a while before other phones even have a hope of seeing this update. This is going to be yet another major Android version out in the wild. Collectively, Android is more like a collection of related but not entirely compatible operating systems, and it's frustrating (particularly for developers) that there isn't a consistent version of the operating system on current phones.
Despite improvements, ICS isn't quite as smooth and responsive as iOS was four years ago on the first iPhone, and it's really becoming quite an annoyance that Google hasn't yet solved this. Much of the reason has to do with the technical foundations Android was based on, rooted in an time when the Blackberry was the most popular smartphone, and Android was expected to drive phones with keyboard input. In that scenario, interface responsiveness wash't as high a priority.
Android was started in 2003 development, while iOS was started in 2005, and before the iPhone came out, the Android emulator looked like this. It wasn't until Apple's little announcement in 2007 that Android suddenly needed to compete on real-time performance, including smooth, touch-based scrolling. iOS is based entirely on Core Animation, with every interface element backed by a GPU-accelerated layer. Android has been CPU-driven, adding bits and pieces of hardware acceleration but not adopting the kind of unified model iOS was based on.
I don't really know why Android's performance hasn't been brought up to par, or why it's taken four years for it to reach the point that ICS has reached. I suspect the requirement to remain generalized and adaptable across multiple hardware devices means many of the design decisions that Apple went with for iOS simply can't be utilized, at least not to the same degree.
By the way, I'm amused at how negative the review is toward previous Android releases, particularly in terms of performance and interface responsiveness, since any time someone brought these common performance criticisms up on Slashdot, they'd always immediately get modded down and their karma ruined:
"Surprisingly, Google never got Gingerbread working smoothly on the Nexus S, and running the stock version of 2.3.6 was a painful experience."
"The old assumption that even a dual core Android phone is not as smooth as a single core iPhone doesn’t apply any more. Apple users will probably still notice some missed frames in animations or small amounts of lag when things are being loaded in the background, but this is no longer a serious usability issue, more a cosmetic one."
"The OS looks much much slicker overall even on the relatively old Nexus S, compared to the cartoonish primitive look of stock Gingerbread."
"The browser gets a much needed overhaul as the stock 2.3 browser was slow and laggy. It is now much faster, smoother to use, and generally stays out of the way like a good browser should."
"To conclude, with no definite date for ICS upgrades for other phones, the Nexus S is a great buy. It is a great example of the importance of software over hardware in a phone, a lesson well learnt from Apple."
And thanks to rogers, I just recieved my 2.3.4 update for my xperia arc today!
Now only about 6 months till they start possibly thinking about giving me the update!
I installed it on my Nexus S several hours ago. I prefer the pure Google experience and don't like to mess with other ROMS, and it was quite an easy install.
ICS is much better than GB. Smoother scrolling, more polished and true multitasking. Music stays running even when paused, and Navigation stays in the background much better... still exploring, but this is everything I wanted from my Nexus S.
I do wish people would allow this spam to stay unmodded for a little longer - the language is just so amusing.
Restore ancient ways in recent street snap of cloak was stars to deduce wantonly
has an inner poetry that is quite beguiling, even if some fool wants to sell a knock-off handbag on the back of it.
It's almost tempting to think that there is a very poorly made recursive transition network somewhere in China knocking this stuff out, but I fear it's just bad Chinglish.
I call B.S. on Windows being any useful comparison at all. That is a complete historical rewrite. When Windows won, there was no Windows and there was no Mac OS - in the same sense there is today. Windows won over Mac OS because Bill Gates is a marketing genius and Steve Jobs had not yet learned that skill. Steve Jobs was still a hippie, and Windows was DOS. At the time when the choice was being made, Neither Mac OS nor "Windows" (Which was little more than a vaporware App for DOS) was the best of breed. Best of breed at the time was the Commodore Amiga. 32 bit multi-tasking, 4096 colors, NTSC (PAL in Europe) video output, quadrophonic Sound (with stereo outputs), and real-time animation against DOS's 'beep' and 16 colors 'Ascii Art' and Mac OS's 64 shades of grey and monophonic MIDI 'sounds'. The best software of the day was being written for it. Electronic Arts was born and started selling games. Disney Animator begat "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", and "Max Headroom" (who was messed up on purpose to emphasize the fact that he was computer generated) and nobody had anything to compare with that. The business world did not really use these things yet. A few forward looking business gave them to secretaries, but there were Macintoshes and PC's both at this time. High end business (like law offices) tended to use Apple because it supported Postscript, and good looking printed output was possible, and low end businesses tended towards PC's running DOS because they were cheaper, and descent printed out was achieved with daisy wheel printers because laser printers needed Postscript, and DOS didn't support it (plus the laser printer cost more than the PC did). Bill Gates was able to manipulate the market to his advantage and nobody else saw it coming until it was too late. To his advantage was indeed an open hardware spec, but none of the companies involved at the time made anything to really compete with the Amiga. Adding peripherals to even try was very expensive, and nobody really tried very hard. Commodore lost by refusing to sell their machines through the toy stores for fear they would not be taken seriously where the Commodore 64 had a virtual lock on the market at the time (The Commodore 64 still holds the record for outselling any single model of computer ever), and insisting on SELLING their demo units to computer retailers, which were all independents at the time and refused to pay for them. So customers had a photograph of a better system in a corner of the store (Amiga), a better, but more expensive, piece of hardware with little software to take advantage of it (Apple), and cheaper hardware with little software to take advantage of it (DOS). "Windows" was useless at this point. There was also Atari, but they were somewhere between Apple and Commodore, and got squeezed out by being a bit too expensive with not quite enough hardware goodies to attract attention. If Commodore had had any marketing sense at all they could have killed everyone at this point, but they missed the boat. Then Apple kicked Steve Jobs out and replaced him with John Scully who made a complete mess of the company, and started losing market share faster than Nokia in the phone market. Steve finally woke up from his LSD infested dream and realized he screwed up. Steve Jobs created NeXT and wrote what is essentially the Mac OS of today, and got Apple back when it was almost completely bankrupt. By this time, Bill Gates had done some very underhanded, illegal, and anti-competitive things in the marketplace, mostly fixed Windows to look like a useful GUI OS, bought the components for Office (all of which were Mac based!), released Mac Office to generate interest in the business world that computers could actually be useful after all, and started porting Office to Windows. Steve Jobs came back to a marketplace John Scully had already lost. Microsoft owned the OS, and was able to write little bugs into Windows to break or slow down things like DR-DOS, Word Perfect, and Lotus 123... and add hooks to their advantage for Offic
Installed since 30 min. Playing around, it's unbelievably unresponsive and slow...
but finally in 2011 I can move emails across folders...
cheers
Paragraphs.
And she had no idea what it meant. I bought us same phones last year and I'm still on 2.6. Gutted. Come on Google send me some love.
This sig is encrypted
I don't care about openness, business models, or market share. What I do demand (and so do the users I support) is reliability and stability.
It's a phone - it needs to be reliable.
The users I support seem to have the same complaints about iOS - lots of stuff breaks every time Apple does a major upgrade.
Apple's forums are loaded with complaints of Bluetooth problems, call quality problems, battery life issues, and synchronization and content problems. It's been this way since iOS 3, and iOS 4, and iOS 5.
Eventually Apple gets around to fixing these things, but I've grown tired of the 2-3 months after EVERY release where Apple puts their fingers in their ears and sings "La, La, La, La, La" - there are no problems.
Apple really needs to fire the entire iOS QA/testing department and start over. Those guys are not doing their jobs.
Meanwhile my droid razr is quite nice - "it just works".
Um - Max Headroom was not animated:
"although the computer generated appearance was achieved with prosthetic make up as the computer technology of the time was not sufficiently advanced to achieve the desired effect. Preparing the look for filming involved a four-and-a-half hour session in make up which Matt Frewer described as "a very painful, tortuous and disgusting enterprise.""
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(character)
Whatever you say about Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, they new how to use paragraphs.
"Whatever you say about Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, they new how to use paragraphs."
You've got some nerve...
If you got one of the first iPad shipment you could double your money on eBay that day - especially if you offered international shipping. It took the world's finest supply chain 20 months to ramp to meet demand. It shocked even Apple. There were nearly riots. It set records for new products, and ran halfway through the second version of the product.
If that's not selling well at first, I wonder what a successful product launch in a new category is. What could you have to gain from voicing such a blatant lie? Nobody could possibly believe it.
Microsoft "won" on the netbook by killing the category. We had nice, snappy Linux netbooks because Linux is thin and light. Convert the vendors to XP, and then to W7, and then threaten them. It's hard to get a Linux netbook now, or one with XP because of "partner" deals to prevent Linux netbooks. And with W7 the experience is completely unsat, unless you drive up the BOM cost with more memory and GPU. And so the category dies because base utility + performance + low cost was what defined the category. What a "win" that is, to head off the competition and kill off the category out from under them without adding any value. Yay team. Way to prevent progress - for a while. Your team did the same thing with the "smartbook" category, that was looking promising.
You have no clue why we hate you, do you? It was this very thing that sparked the migration to mobile that you can't stop. Your flopping about in the mobile category is quite entertaining.
People don't want Windows. People haven't wanted Windows since Windows 95, when it was cool. Microsoft tries very hard to make sure people don't get a choice for anything but Windows. People want to do stuff, and for that neither Windows nor Office is required - as some 50 million iPad users, as many Mac users, hundreds of millions of Android phone and tablet users are discovering. Office is neat, but office apps have been a solved problem for 20 years.
We're going mobile, and Microsoft isn't coming with us. W8 isn't going to win mobile, it's going to kill Microsoft's place on the desktop.
Here's what W8 is going to do:
And of course the relationship with the consumer market is already dead. iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tabs don't need antivirus - and the implicit performance and battery hit those things imply.
Help stamp out iliturcy.