Tom Anderson's thoughts on Ice Cream Sandwich | Hacker News Reader

Tom Anderson's thoughts on Ice Cream Sandwich

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30 pointssolipsist12 comments

Other things that I noticed when I updated my Nexus S:

* Scrolling and transition animations are a bit smoother. Not quite iPhone smooth but almost. * The tile based rendering for the browser is quite noticeable. While a page is rendering you'll see some tiles rendered at various resolutions or not at all and you can be waiting a while sometimes before the tile you want to read is rendered. * The browser has a save for offline reading option. * The browser allows many more 'open' tabs than it did previously * The locked screen now lets you swipe right to unlock, or left to turn on the camera. This is great for fast access to the camera app. * The locked screen also shows controls for pausing and skipping songs when the music app is running. * Contacts that don't have an international prefix are no longer recognised. I was a bit confused when I started getting messages from unknown numbers before realising I had to update my contacts. * I can no longer lock the screen when playing Angry Birds. When I unlock, the app has died (presumably run out of memory). I guess this is because ICS takes more memory. * The task manager now has thumbnails and is a lot slower to load.

So overall I would agree there are some improvements, some changes and some new bugs. But I would recommend upgrading if only for the improved speed - I find it strange that Tom didn't mention that.

My overall experience on my Nexus S:

-Horrible, awful battery life. Probably about 12 hours. Hoping they get a fix out soon...

-UI is much smoother and more polished than Gingerbread (smoother animations, extra room to put apps on homescreen with the bottom bar)

-The new widget features are great (can add a homescreen icon to call/text a specific person, play a playlist, navigate/open a map for a specific location)

I love it except for the battery issues.

Funny hearing someone complain about 12hrs battery life. I was getting about 7hrs on my Nexus S with Gingerbread, till I started disabling Wifi and GPS by default, and only using them when needed. That bumped it up to about 12hrs which I was very happy with.

Obviously not nearly as good as the several days worth that a regular phone provides, or the +20% more or so that iPhones can do, but serviceable at least.

UI lag is noticeably reduced in ICS, which was my only other major complaint besides battery life. Still much room for improvement vs iPhone, but it's no longer an actual irritant which I'm thankful for.

"Battery Life" is extremely situational. I'm getting a typical 16 hour day on mine with 10-20% reported capacity left over. That's with light use (maybe an hour of screen-on time) in an environment with 1-2 "bars" (haven't checked RSSI nor investigated how it scales to the signal icon) of Verizon coverage.

>-The new widget features are great (can add a homescreen icon to call/text a specific person, play a playlist, navigate/open a map for a specific location)

The widgets you listed here are identical to their GB counterparts.

Also, I find it strange you get such poor battery life. The battery life on my Nexus is far superior to stock.

> The widgets you listed here are identical to their GB counterparts.

... shit, did they really exist before? Wow, I'm an idiot. I guess I never looked at the widgets menu very closely until I got the upgrade...

> Also, I find it strange you get such poor battery life. The battery life on my Nexus is far superior to stock.

It seems to be a (nearly?) universal issue - Google stopped the OTA update due to the battery issue. (http://www.technobuffalo.com/companies/google/android/google...)

Nexus S supports deep sleep on custom ROMs. I've been impressed with ICS increasing battery life by hardware accelerating the basic apps

The tl;dr on this one seems to be: Some things are different. Some things are better. Some things are hard to find. Is there any unique insight in this submission that I'm missing?

I found it interesting. I have a Galaxy Nexus on the way, and now have a list of things I'd like to try.

CM9 capitalizes on ICS changes and adds some interesting things already. For one, you can enter names "t9-style" into the dialer and it will suggest the closest contact without having to scroll. Very nice if you have hundreds of contacts.

Just a thought, if you've got a Nexus, you're 5 minutes away from having CM9.

Hm? Are the nightly builds out already? Or are you on Koush's builds?

Koush isn't building for the Galaxy Nexus (sorry, I didn't realize the OP article was about a N-S build), he has builds for the Nexus S, though someone else is building from his work, he's back on his own awesome projects.

The CM team is working on CM9 and you can build it yourself (with cherry-picks from gerrit/github if it fits your fancy). Fitsnugly and winner00 are maintaining builds on rootzwiki. (Fitsnugly is a bit more stock and winner00 includes more, what I would call, non-kosher bits).

The CM team used to let the build bots run pretty early on in the development cycle and stopped doing so for various reasons. Fortunately their code is all open source.

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