Liam Spradlin
Contributing since August, 2011
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1523articles
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About Liam Spradlin
Liam loves Android, design, user experience, and travel. He doesn't love ill-proportioned letter forms, advertisements made entirely of stock photography, and writing biographical snippets.
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One of the features I'm most excited about in Ice Cream Sandwich is the camera. The new camera app really raises the bar, bringing a heap of improvements, as well as plenty of features we haven't seen before.
Gmail, probably the most used app on my Evo 4G, will be getting a major facelift with the introduction of Ice Cream Sandwich, bringing it into line with - and, in some ways, surpassing - its Honeycomb counterpart.
Leading up to last night's Ice Cream Sandwich announcement, there were rumblings that perhaps Chrome would make its Android debut with the latest iteration of Google's mobile OS. Unfortunately, those rumors turned out to be false, but the new browser that Google has cooked up looks pretty awesome, and packs in a lot of notable features.
Android's voice capabilities have always impressed me, giving me the ability to speak to my phone instead of spending time typing. Raising the bar a bit, Google introduced us tonight to live speech-to-text, making message dictation faster and more streamlined than ever.
One of the most useful features of Android, in my opinion, is spell check. When attempting to convey information quickly, it's easy to make mistakes, and it's nice to have a device that catches them for you.
If you find PIN codes or gesture patterns too predictable to keep your phone secure, Ice Cream Sandwich has the ultimate solution: face unlock.
While tonight's event positively overloaded us with details about Ice Cream Sandwich, there were some features that didn't make the cut - Android engineer Dan Morrill has spilled the details on even more awesome features we can expect from the latest version of Android, posting a brief message about them on Google+. Unfortunately we don't have screen shots of these features, but we can discuss what information we do have, feature-by-feature.
A concern that's been on the tip of the Android community's tongue lately is hardware acceleration. It's something we've been waiting for for a while now, and it looks like Ice Cream Sandwich will finally deliver.
Some of the most impressive features unveiled at tonight's Ice Cream Sandwich Announcement surrounded the home screen and multitasking. This time around, Google has packed an absurd amount of awesomeness into Android, and while the home screen is just the beginning, there's a lot going on that's worth discussing.
Adding to the heap of shiny new features brought to us in Ice Cream Sandwich, we've got a new lock screen, and of course the fabled virtual button bar.
One of Android's new features that was stressed pretty heavily on stage tonight was Roboto, a system font created specifically for Ice Cream Sandwich, which, in all honesty, looks a lot better than the system fonts we've seen before.
Late last week, Device Frame Generator made its debut in the Android Asset Studio, thanks to Roman Nurik. Mere moments after the unveiling of the Galaxy Prime at an event held by Google and Samsung, DFG has been updated to include a Galaxy Nexus template.
So it's over - we've just finished watching one of the best Android presentations to date, and there's a lot to talk about. One of the primary topics on my mind right now is Ice Cream Sandwich, but more important than that is the device which will first bring it to our hands.
Just in time for tonight's big announcement from Google and Samsung, a video has been discovered that appears to be promotional material for NVIDIA's fabled Tegra 3 processor, formerly known as Kal-El.
Pretty much the first thing that gets done to a new Android device when it hits the market is benchmarking. The Android community seems to be obsessed with benchmarking their devices over and over, and comparing the results to other devices. Personally I've always found this practice to be a curiosity at best, mainly because apps such as Quadrant give somewhat nebulous scores, which are hard to compare objectively, and offer little in the way of exact measurements. Rightware, a well known provider of benchmarking tools for various platforms, is looking to disambiguate the benchmarking process, however, with Basemark OS for Android.
It looks like Samsung, on its webpage for the Galaxy Player 50, has ripped off the iPhone's Maps app, altering a screenshot ever so slightly for use in a web graphic of the 50. For reference, here's the original screenshot vs. Samsung's image:
Maxelus, a "Top Developer" in the Android Market, is well known for creating stunning (if not slightly trippy) live wallpapers - particularly the "Galaxy" series of LWPs that bring gorgeous, fictional outer space scenes to your Android phone or tablet.
Joining the vast crowd of dialer replacements in the Android Market, our hunt has brought us to Angel Dialer, an uncomplicated app that effectively replaces the stock Android dialer, but which may have compromised necessary functionality for a no-frills implementation.
The Sony Reader PRS-T1, a 6" e-ink reader that debuted earlier this year, has been hacked to run Android. It's a known fact that the Reader has been running Android from the get-go, but it runs a heavily modified build, and many thought that it would never see true Android goodness. Any doubt users had, however, can now be laid to rest - an unnamed hacker has got the T1 running Android with AWLauncher, and a bevvy of reading apps in tow.
Twitter is absolutely abuzz about Verizon's LTE network at the moment, but not because it's blazingly fast or convenient for on-the-go web browsing. No, Twitter is currently blowing up because it seems that 4G is down for most (if not all) VZW subscribers. For many 4G users, 3G is also having issues, likely a side-effect caused by Verizon's 4G devices. Adding to the flood of tweets, reader J Weissman has also confirmed the outage, tipping us just moments ago.