Google Galaxy Nexus With Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich

JPEG image, 300x285px, 12KB
Google Galaxy Nexus

The next generation of Google’s Android platform with their flagship phone model has been announced in Hong Kong on 18 Oct 2011. This is the fourth major version of the open mobile platform code-named Ice Cream Sandwich.

Here is my take on the new features and capabilities being shown now.

New look and feel – The new font is very pleasing to look with its slight curves at the ends of letters. I’ve always favoured the darker theme starting with 3.x and this version will do well to give that kind of sophistication to the device.

Face Unlock – Should be quite secure, knowing that face recognition technology can differentiate between a live human face and a photo. My concern is whether the front-facing camera is fast enough to be enabled and unlock the phone compared to existing methods. What about lighting conditions, cultural limitations, and when you are not in a comfortable position to use your face?

Android Beam – Now this is the future of sharing with friends physically near to you. It has always been a hassle to go through the vast data network just to go between devices a few feet away. Bluetooth transfers are not platform-agnostic and tends to be slow.

Voice typing – A useful feature we all know as dictation. Has to be real-time and not have to wait for it to “think” after finishing a sentence. Still, I’ve yet to see any such voice recognition technology being able to understand all variants of English. I remember IBM used to do this quite well with your own voice being trained first. Compared to Siri on the iPhone 4S, I think this lacks that extra ability to get your phone to do simple tasks without typing, such as create reminders and search for short answers.

Google+ – We already got that everywhere, Google.

Browser – Good to improve on the tab management. I find myself going to the menu too often to move between tabs. This is not difficult to implement, what took you so long?

Gmail – Offline capability is important, as much as people use this on their desktops. Bring it to Google Docs too!

Mobile Data Management – Eh, 3G Watchdog?

Single-Motion Panoramic Camera – Simple trick of recording your shot in video then stitching the best frames together to make that panorama effect. Nothing new or useful here (how often do you look or print a panorama?).

Vibrant high-definition display – 4.65″ sAMOLED with 720p screen? Sorry I don’t intend to carry a TV in my pocket and I don’t think I’ll grow bigger hands any time soon.

JPEG image, 200x200x, 4KB
Nokia 8110

Contour Display – Nokia 8110, no thanks.

Conclusion

I’m not greatly impressed by the feature list. While it is good to leave hardware buttons in the past, ICS lacks new ideas on the way we interact with the device. Why don’t we make more use of the sensors such as the gyroscope, compass, GPS and microphone?

Location-based services are very useful these days, if you can develop the smart apps for it. Videos and other data-intensive apps need the ability to download via wi-fi and in the background, managed by the Android system.

Use the display in new ways, such as a means to communicate or as a dashboard in the car. We need better graphic API with lower cost of C/GPU usage. I’m not interested in having a 2GHz chip in my pocket when the GUI staggers along!

What are your thoughts on this phone and Android 4.0?

Links

Google Galaxy Nexushttp://www.google.com/nexus

Unwrapping Ice Cream Sandwich on the Galaxy Nexushttp://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2011/10/unwrapping-ice-cream-sandwich-on-galaxy.html

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

Share

Recover Android Phone Storage Using Temporary Root

If you often encounter the dreaded “Phone storage is getting low” notification on your Android 2.2+ phone and have already tried using “Manage applications” (under “Menu” -> “Settings” -> “Applications“) and/or “App 2 SD” to remove apps, move apps on phone storage to the SD card, or cleared the cache, you can try the following procedure to move even more “phone-only” apps to your SD card.

I have used this to gain about 30MB of phone storage by moving huge apps such as iGO (17MB), Skype (4MB) and fring (3MB). Although some of these apps have not been configured/enabled by their developers to be installed on the SD card, the procedure overcomes this by using a powerful tool called Titanium Backup.

Not every app should be moved to the SD card. You should not move system or ROM apps such as GMail, Internet, or Youtube. Apps with widgets should be avoided as well, since the widgets will break on your home screens if you move them.

When you have Titanium Backup on your phone, it can also perform detailed backups of your apps and data and remove ROM or manufacturer-installed apps (aka bloatware). Another three apps below allow you to download and purchase apps from Market if you are in a country or with an operator with limited Market access.

Warning: please make a full backup of your phone before attempting this procedure. I am not responsible for any outcome resulting from this procedure.

Prerequisites:

  1. Android 2.2 (Froyo) or above phone
  2. VISIONary+ by MoDaCo (download link)
  3. Superuser by ChainsDD (download link)
  4. Titanium Backup by Joel Bourquard (download link)
  5. Market-Enabler by Andrea Baccega and Tim Strazzere (download link)

Procedure:

  1. Go to “Menu” -> “Settings” -> “Applications” -> “Development” and check/enable “USB debugging“.
  2. Download and install VISIONary+. Launch VISIONary+ and click “Temproot now“. The display will show an icon and some text indicating its progress and return back to the menu. Go back to your home screen.

    JPEG image 237x368
    VISIONary+
  3. Download and install Superuser. You may launch Superuser to look at its interface, but there’s nothing you need to do there at this point.

    JPEG image 320x457
    Superuser
  4. Download and install Titanium Backup. Launch Titanium Backup and Superuser will interrupt with the following screen (not the exact wording here, just an example). Tap “Allow” to grant Titanium Backup temporary superuser/root access.

    JPEG image 318x430
    Superuser in Titanium Backup
  5. Titanium Backup will now gather the list of apps installed on your phone (dialog will indicate “Building exact app size information“), which may take a few minutes to complete.
  6. Tap “Problems?” button at the bottom, and tap “Yes, do it“. This downloads an additional tool called busybox into Titanium Backup’s data.

    JPEG image 265x450
    Titanium Backup
  7. Note the amount of free phone storage just above the bottom row of buttons, labelled “Internal“. The next few steps should attempt to increase the free amount.
  8. Tap “Backup / Restore” button at the top, you will see the list of apps that you can backup, remove and other operations.
  9. For each app that you want to move to SD card, tap the app and tap “Move to SD card“. After a while, the app will be moved from your phone storage to the SD card. You can note the additional free space gained in Titanium Backup.
  10. Optional – If your Market is limited, download and install Market-Enabler. Tap “Settings list” on top and select one of the more popular (read US) operators to fake your phone to. Go back to Market and see if you can search for and download more/premium apps.

    JPEG image 320x569
    Market-Enabler

I managed to go from 9MB phone storage available to 40MB, which gives more space for data-intensive apps such as Google Maps, Google Reader, Internet and Opera Mini. Hope this helps you, enjoy!

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Share