If you have been waiting for the Android 4.0, Google and Samsung just finished it’s press event in Hong Kong minutes ago.
At the event, Samsung was first to speak about it’s new Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the first phone powered by the new Android 4.0 operating system.
Samsung Galaxy Nexus
The new phone is based is a HSPA+ 21Mbps / HSUPA 5.76Mbps phone supporting 850/900/1900/1700/2100. EDGE/GPRS 850900/1800/1900. It has a 1.2GHz dual core processor with a large 4.65″ 1280×720 HD Super AMOLED Screen powered by by Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
Samsung Galaxy Nexus will be offered in HSPA+ in NOV 2011 and LTE versions in different regions later. It has a Super AMOLED HD 1280×720 display with contrast ratio of 100,000:1. The screen is 4.65inch. it has a Contour display, sleek and curve 8.94mm and a bezel of 4.29mm.
It has a 5 megapixel full HD recording camera with 0 shutter lag for low light shooting. It will come with Barometer, NFC – payment options, contacts sharing, POGO pin – docking for sharing videos.
The camera is a 5 mega pixel camera with LED. Front camera is a 1.3 mega pixel for video conferencing.
The camera is also capable of doing vido recording in MPEG4/H.263/H.264 ni 1080p@30fps HD. Music playback is in Mp3/AAC/AAC+/eAAC+
The phone has BT ver 3.0, USB 2.0, WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n (2.4GHz/5GHz) and NFC. It also has Accelerometer, Compass, Gyro, Promimity and Barometer.
The memory capacity is 1GB (RAM) + 16GB/32GB (ROM). It has a dimension of 135.5×67.94×8.44mm and weighs 135g and comes with a 1750mAh battery.
Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
Android 4.0 will have a new font type – Roboto which gives the phone a magazine layout font type that is easy to the eyes. There is a new lock screen for it and Android has also update the animations and Live wall papers.
Buttons are gone, replaced with touch screen virtual buttons which are part of the OS. With the new OS you can now group apps into folder just like Apple’s iOS. You can also place your favourite apps or contacts on the taskbar.
Other improvements over the previous versions include a new pull down notification screen, more accurate and responsive keyboard, in line spell checker, improved cut and paste.
Something different is that Android 4.0 now offer voice recognition in real time, it does not need to ‘think’ for a few seconds, it just show you word for word when you speak into the phone.
ANother new idea they have is the face unlock feature. By capturing your face, the phone will be able to recognise the owner of the phone and unlock it. It did not mention what will happen if it recognises the person wrongly for more than 3 times, does it destory all the data intact ? Unfortunately, we are unable to witness it as the demo failed probably due to beta ware.
Other improvements include web browser. It now allows you to do inprivate browsing, offline reading, gmail offline search for 30 days, a revamped calendar.
For those on limited HSPA traffic, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich now offers you a way to check your data usage. It can also detect which are the applications that are choking up data for the month. Of course you can set alert when your data usage is reaching say 5 GB.
You can now take pictures without entering the phone by dragging the lock bar to the left to access the camera feature. with the immediate access, you can now send pictures almost instantly to social networks. enhance it with filters to change angle of shot etc. There is also panorama shooting which stiches photos for a wider viewing angle. Video recording is 1080P HD. It can zoom and focus continuously. it can also do time lapse video recording.
ANdroid 4.0 also introduce PEOPLE APP, a central application that keeps you updated with your contacts social network profiles and contact information.
Lastly, Android 4.0 comes with NFC. A new program Android Beam is introduced that is capable ot sharing any content between android devices by placing two phones back to back
Users can now share photos, contacts, even share the game (on marketplace) by just bumpping the two phones back to back.
At the closing of the media conference, Google reiterate that the developer tools are ready and the first Android 4.0 phone will go on sale in November.