Quite impressive. 10 for performance and software (iPhone 4S received 8 and 9). The device seems to be very good, but ICS is the star here. I am eagerly waiting to receive the update at my Nexus S.
I still prefer iOS on tablets (I like the changes Apple made for the iPad and I also think that for some strange reason iOS visually works better on tablets than phones) but on smartphones there are now two OS – WP7, too – that look better than iOS†.
That’s looks. I’m definitely looking forward to trying ICS out and it looks like Google put a lot of work into fixing many (all?) of the little and big annoyances that previously made me want to throw Android devices at the wall when I used them for longer than ten minutes.
It’s nice that Android is shaping up as a real alternative for me. (What’s a bit annoying is that if you want a phone without all the crap you have about as much choice as when you buy an iPhone. I’m not sure whether Google wants to or can change that with ICS.)
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† Android still gets details wrong. I can live with that. More or less, I guess.
Also agree that the UX looks massively improved as well. It always felt like features and ugly shininess took precedence over UX before, but it seems like Duarte is having a good influence here.
On crapware, one of the announced features for ICS is that you can disable (meaning stop from running and hide from app drawers and home screens) any app from system settings.
The sort of obvious thing (to me) for them to do going forward is to platformize Android better, so that manufacturers/vendors can differentiate by adding UI components, etc. in a modular way that's easy to turn off, and easy to update around. I.e. there should be a big VANILLA ANDROID button in the settings, and they should push updates more aggressively.
But ICS definitely looks like a step in the right direction.
Anyhow, we are in a free world where everyone can make reviews and I'm glad we are in that world.
This is how it's always been with game reviews, for instance. A video game released in 1996 gets a 10/10 because it's better than other games yet seen. The same game released today would get panned. It doesn't imply any claim to absolute perfection.
Those who write extended reviews are likely to have fairly good intuition about which phones are good enough to write about. Nobody is going to spend days writing a review for a phone that someone would only get because it's "free" with a contract.
I think it makes sense.
a few other devices have announce 1Q11 or 2Q11 (mostly the latter)
Tablets I've heard about:
- ASUS Transformer (and Transformer Prime if necessary) update "soon" after the Transformer Prime launch (possibly before the end of the year) [1] I believe the Slider is also being upgraded, but I'm not sure whether or not it is on the same schedule.
- Acer Iconia tablets update January 2012
- Motorola XOOM confirmed (no ETA except for a retracted 6 weeks after source release). Surprisingly (for a launch device), it sounds like the XOOM won't be the first Android tablet to ICS.
- Samsung Galaxy Tab - all Honeycomb models are getting ICS (no ETA)
- Lenovo's working on a Tegra 3 ICS tablet (rumored to be out late this year), but I haven't seen anything about their existing Honeycomb tablets
[1] That probably sounds incredible if you haven't seen ASUS's stunning update history so far (beating the XOOM to worldwide rollouts of new Honeycomb versions and several feature/bugfix upgrades, to boot). I'm one happy ASUS customer.