Google Rolls Out Official Android 4.0 ICS Update 92
dell623 writes "Google is rolling out an OTA upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich for the Nexus S. GSM versions can already be updated manually. An early review is largely positive and comments on the significant visual and performance improvements. The Nexus S upgrade allows for a direct comparison against Gingerbread on the same hardware, and the likely improvement in current phones that will receive the upgrade."
running it (Score:5, Interesting)
I installed it on my Nexus S several hours ago. I prefer the pure Google experience and don't like to mess with other ROMS, and it was quite an easy install.
ICS is much better than GB. Smoother scrolling, more polished and true multitasking. Music stays running even when paused, and Navigation stays in the background much better... still exploring, but this is everything I wanted from my Nexus S.
Re:Android performance - Windows won why? (Score:5, Interesting)
I call B.S. on Windows being any useful comparison at all. That is a complete historical rewrite. When Windows won, there was no Windows and there was no Mac OS - in the same sense there is today. Windows won over Mac OS because Bill Gates is a marketing genius and Steve Jobs had not yet learned that skill. Steve Jobs was still a hippie, and Windows was DOS. At the time when the choice was being made, Neither Mac OS nor "Windows" (Which was little more than a vaporware App for DOS) was the best of breed. Best of breed at the time was the Commodore Amiga. 32 bit multi-tasking, 4096 colors, NTSC (PAL in Europe) video output, quadrophonic Sound (with stereo outputs), and real-time animation against DOS's 'beep' and 16 colors 'Ascii Art' and Mac OS's 64 shades of grey and monophonic MIDI 'sounds'. The best software of the day was being written for it. Electronic Arts was born and started selling games. Disney Animator begat "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", and "Max Headroom" (who was messed up on purpose to emphasize the fact that he was computer generated) and nobody had anything to compare with that. The business world did not really use these things yet. A few forward looking business gave them to secretaries, but there were Macintoshes and PC's both at this time. High end business (like law offices) tended to use Apple because it supported Postscript, and good looking printed output was possible, and low end businesses tended towards PC's running DOS because they were cheaper, and descent printed out was achieved with daisy wheel printers because laser printers needed Postscript, and DOS didn't support it (plus the laser printer cost more than the PC did). Bill Gates was able to manipulate the market to his advantage and nobody else saw it coming until it was too late. To his advantage was indeed an open hardware spec, but none of the companies involved at the time made anything to really compete with the Amiga. Adding peripherals to even try was very expensive, and nobody really tried very hard. Commodore lost by refusing to sell their machines through the toy stores for fear they would not be taken seriously where the Commodore 64 had a virtual lock on the market at the time (The Commodore 64 still holds the record for outselling any single model of computer ever), and insisting on SELLING their demo units to computer retailers, which were all independents at the time and refused to pay for them. So customers had a photograph of a better system in a corner of the store (Amiga), a better, but more expensive, piece of hardware with little software to take advantage of it (Apple), and cheaper hardware with little software to take advantage of it (DOS). "Windows" was useless at this point. There was also Atari, but they were somewhere between Apple and Commodore, and got squeezed out by being a bit too expensive with not quite enough hardware goodies to attract attention. If Commodore had had any marketing sense at all they could have killed everyone at this point, but they missed the boat. Then Apple kicked Steve Jobs out and replaced him with John Scully who made a complete mess of the company, and started losing market share faster than Nokia in the phone market. Steve finally woke up from his LSD infested dream and realized he screwed up. Steve Jobs created NeXT and wrote what is essentially the Mac OS of today, and got Apple back when it was almost completely bankrupt. By this time, Bill Gates had done some very underhanded, illegal, and anti-competitive things in the marketplace, mostly fixed Windows to look like a useful GUI OS, bought the components for Office (all of which were Mac based!), released Mac Office to generate interest in the business world that computers could actually be useful after all, and started porting Office to Windows. Steve Jobs came back to a marketplace John Scully had already lost. Microsoft owned the OS, and was able to write little bugs into Windows to break or slow down things like DR-DOS, Word Perfect, and Lotus 123... and add hooks to their advantage for Offic
Re:Slow as hell!! (Score:4, Interesting)
The gmail application was very slow for me too until I purged all its data and resync'd from the server, now it's pretty reasonable.
Perhaps there was a storage format change and a poorly written compatibility shim in place.
Re:Android performance (Score:0, Interesting)
Why is Android more popular than the iPhone? Three reasons:
1. It's the "Not Apple" solution for people who can't stand the Steve Jobs hype/reality distortion field.
2. The phones are a better value without the "Apple" branding premium.
3. Control. The iPhone is completely controlled by Apple. That can have a good impact on usability, but prevents me from programming my phone to act as a rouge wifi hotspot stealing people's vacation photos. So long as Apple has a "walled-garden" app store, the Android Market WILL grow faster. This means that Android is guaranteed to have more and more app diversity as time goes on.
I'm not going to develop apps for a platform so that I can present them to a dictator to see if they meet his approval. That uncertainty on ROI wrapped around valuable investments of programming time and development resources is unacceptable to me.
The users want the device that developers are writing applications for. That means they choose the device that "I"(collective app developer I) choose to develop for.