Talking purely about looks: The look is a massive improvement over Honeycomb with its terrible 1980s future look (and quite obviously so much better than anything Android offered before).
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.
Completely agree that it's a massive improvement over Tron-inspired Honeycomb.
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.
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.