Top 3 Design Improvements in Android 40 Ice Cream Sandwich

Google's latest update to its world-famous Android mobile operating system includes not really a strengthening of the operating-system itself but also a standard redesign of the elements in its user interface.

If you loved the easy and user-friendly interface of either Android 2.3 Gingerbread or Android 3.0 Honeycomb, additionally, you will love the new improvements in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, which supposedly brings together the best elements of Gingerbread and Honeycomb.

Here are the three top design improvements that Google implemented in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

Typography That's Easy on the Eyes

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich will enchant users having an Android that is completely redone and made over--starting using its typeface called Roboto, that is used all around the various screens and widgets.

Roboto is a sans-serif typeface introduced in the most recent Android 4.0 operating-system. Google described it as a "modern, yet approachable" font. Despite having been criticized for imitating more popular and well-established typefaces such as Helvetica, Univers, or Myriad, the brand new typeface in ICS does make reading text easy on an Android smartphone.

It is the very typeface that appears in Ice Cream Sandwich's magazine-type design ethos--big pictures, bold headlines, plenty of resting spaces for the eyes (called "white space" in publication parlance).

The Lock Screen in Android 4.0, for instance, reeks of Roboto throughout. The digital clock is in Roboto. The day, date, and charging information come in Roboto. Roboto is splattered around Ice Cream Sandwich. Apart from Roboto on the Lock Screen, Google has also updated the live wallpaper on the lock screen--it now shows rich but subtle animations of blue orbs rising skywards.

New Home Screen

In virtually any Android smartphone or tablet, the Home screen is where everything begins. Unlocking the telephone brings you to the house screen, with an analog clock in the center of the screen and some virtual buttons below. Ice Cream Sandwich supplies a new, innovative solution to interact with these devices. Virtual buttons have been integrated into the machine, and they hide if they know they are not needed. Thus, you get a bigger viewing area with those buttons out of way as you browse the Web together with your Android phone or while watching movies or videos.

The Home screen is not only the place to start from where one can run your applications. Additionally it is a place for the widgets, giving you usage of important information without the need to go anywhere. And, widgets in ICS, just like in Honeycomb are resizable. You may make them as large as you want, or no more than you want. They're your widgets, and Android 4.0 enables you to have your way with them.

Adding widgets in ICS is also faster and easier. With the widget tab, it is simple to locate your widgets, or pick and drag the ones that you need to drop on your own Home screen. With better widgets, ICS gives you that breath of oxygen in terms of adding your individual touch and customizing your Android phone and its Home screen.

Folders and Favorites Tray

You can think of folders as containers, just like real-life folders, that allow you to group and organize printed documents. In Android 4.0, you can group your favorite apps, contacts, and more into folders. All it requires is dragging and dropping icons from another folder to some other. Easy breezy organization and management with folders.

Also, with Android 4.0, now you can customize your Favorites Tray in the bottom of the screen. Should you have placed your preferred apps inside one folder, and you also want them to be instantly accessible no matter which screen you're viewing, just place them in the Favorites Tray.

These three design features aren't just eye candy. They are designed to be functional improvements whose chief goal is to make Android 4.0 easier and more pleasurable to use. With these improvements in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, users of Android smartphones and Android tablets are certain to get the very best of both Gingerbread and Honeycomb.

Eager to learn about Android smartphones and Android tablets? Or, perhaps, you already own one and wish to know what else that intelligent device can do to make your daily life just a little bit lacking paradise? Get some TidBits of Android news