What’s new in Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich?

Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich seems to be the most polished Android ever. For the first time Android is talking about beauty and elegance. Thanks to Guy Kawasaki Android is now enchanting. At least the Android team thinks it is.

There are some significant improvements to make things easier and to make the Android experience less geeky.

While there are more features of interest on ICS, here are the top 5 which makes things simpler :

People App

ICS’s new People app works on the contact list and gathers the social media activity. There are quite a few apps/startups who are working in this space. They want to make Address Book sexy again. Xobni Smartr is one such app. Drumbi is yet another app. Everyme is another intelligent social address book app. I hope Android is trying to answer all these apps with the People app.

Roboto

A new typeface completely worked from ground up. This gives Android a completely new look.

Android Beam

You can literally touch 2 ICS powered phones which are also NFC enabled to transfer content. If you are viewing a web page on phone A, then bring phone B and make it hug phone A and voila, the web page is on phone B. A new way to share things.

Think of Andriod Beam as Bluetooth and Bump without the pairing and with some excessive touch.

Quick response

This is a quick text message you can send to someone who called you at the wrong time. This is such a simple thing to implement, I wonder, why no one has implemented it till now. A simple feature phone like Samsung Corby had it much before than ICS. Better late than never.

Face Unlock

No more gestures and no more passwords. You can unlock your Android phone with just your smile. Now you got one more reason to smile.

There are features like single motion panoramic camera, taking the screen shot from the phone, WiFi Direct, rich notifications, multi tasking, recent apps and enhanced Google+ experience.

Samsung Galaxy Nexus is the first Ice Cream Sandwich powered phone.