The Best New Features in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich

Google just unveiled their new Nexus phone, the Galaxy Nexus, along with a preview of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, coming to phones next year. Here's a look at the creamy new update to the Android operating system.

Most of what's gone into Ice Cream Sandwich is polish, making Android slicker, easier to use, and (finally) more consistent across the board. It's mostly filled with small improvements and tweaks that Google rattled off pretty quickly, so we've listed our favorites here in bulleted form. This isn't a comprehensive list; this is just what Google demoed at today's event—so there's probably even more to come.

Basic Improvements to Android

Google's made a lot of improvements in the way Android looks and feels, from the home screen to the notification drawer to the keyboard, including:

• Full size

  
• A new stylish lock screen, complete with facial recognition features that let you unlock your phone with a front-facing camera, as well as the ability to launch right into the camera with one gesture
• A bigger emphasis on consistency with the way gestures work. For example, in the app drawer, you now swipe left to right to see other pages of apps, more like the home screens.
• Widgets are now stored on another tab in the app drawer, making them easier to add to your home screen. They're also resizable.
• Folders are now easier to create and use. Just drag one app on top of another, iOS-style to create a folder. You can rearrange them in the folder the same way, and it's all very fluid.
• Ice Cream Sandwich's dock is customizable, and you can even put folders into it for quick access to apps and contacts.
• Screenshot taking is now built-in. You can snap one by pressing Volume down + Power.Finally.
• 
  
  Full size

  
• Notifications (pictured) are prettier and a tad more useful, showing small contact pictures next to notifications pertaining to email, SMS messages, and so on.
• You can swipe from left to right to clear single notifications from the drawer, so your notifications aren't so cluttered.CyanogenMod users will be quite familiar with this feature.
• You can open the notification drawer from the lock screen, without unlocking your phone. This is actually very convenient.
• The new keyboard has better targeting, a simpler recommendations bar, and inline spell checking. Copy and paste has also been improved, and you can even select text and just drag it around within your message fluidly.
• Speech-to-text now decodes your phrases in real time. When you say a word, you see that word show up in the window, before you move on to the next one—you no longer have to finish an entire sentence before seeing it show up in the text window.
• A new default typeface, humorously labeled "Roboto" (but that actually looks pretty good)

Ice Cream Sandwich also sets the stage for button-less phones, à la the Honeycomb tablets. The Galaxy Nexus has no buttons on the front; it's all built-in to the OS. It also raises icon resolution, among other things, so it'll look good on higher-res phones—again, like the 4.65 inch, 1280x720 screen on the Galaxy Nexus.

The Browser

The browser has a few nice features, but the biggest is certainly bookmark syncing with Chrome. Now, Andorid's browser will automatically use your Google account to sync all Chrome bookmarks to your phone. It also has a feature that'll take you from a web site's mobile page to the desktop page in one tap, which is really great. Tab management is similar to the old browser, but you can now "flick" tabs away to close them, which looks almost WebOS-like. And, lastly, it has a new "save for offline" feature for those articles you want to save for later. It won't tear out the article and make it more "readable", likeRead It Later does, but rather save the entire page in its current state for offline viewing.

Gmail

Full size

Gmail's entire interface has been revamped, featuring a very large, easy-to-read inbox with 2-line previews so you can more easily view your messages without even opening them. The action bar at the bottom has also improved, with simple buttons for creating a new message, viewing your labels, searching your inbox, and more. And, speaking of inbox search, Gmail now downloads the last 30 days worth of messages for searching, a value that you can change as much as you want in the settings. Lastly, when you're viewing a message, you can quickly transition to the next message with a swipe gesture—going back to their whole point of "making gestures consistent across the OS". It's a nice touch.

Calendar

Full size

The new calendar app is also nice, mostly in the realm of touch gestures. Like Gmail, you can swipe from side to side to move from day to day, and you can even pinch to zoom in on a specific block of the day. The whole thing is very smooth and fluid, moving as your fingers pinch to the exact block you specify.

Data Tracking

Full size

You can now track your data usage from Android's settings, and it looks really slick. Not only do you have the typical "this is how much data you've used this month" chart, as well as app-by-app usage to see which apps are the worst offenders, but you can pinpoint any block of time on the graph and see data usage for just that timeframe. For example, if there's a huge jump in data usage over a two-day period of time, you can "zoom in" on those two days and see which apps were using the most data during just those two days. It's a really effective way of tracking your usage. You can also add warnings for when you reach a certain threshhold, or even cut off data usage entirely when you go over a certain level—ensuring that you never go over your data cap without your say so.

Camera & Gallery

The new camera app is designed to be fast and easy to use—they've minimized shutter lag, meaning the camera opens quickly and takes pictures instantly, without any loading time between shots. It's difficult to tell how well this will work on non-Galaxy Nexus phones, but the demo on the Galaxy Nexus looked fantastic. You can also access the camera right from the lock screen, making taking those spur-of-the-moment pictures near instantaneous.

The camera also has a built-in panorama mode, in which you just scan the camera from left to right to take a panorama shot—none of this taking-multiple-images-that-sort-of-fit-together business. It'll automatically stitch them together for you. Video recording has also improved, with continuous focus, zoom-while-recording, and time lapse features, not to mention the ability to take snapshots while you're recording video.

As far as the Gallery goes, you get this great "magazine-style" view with large thumbnails for your albums. You can browse your library by album, by location, or even by the people you tag in your photos. It also includes a simple photo editor, letting you remove red eye, crop, tilt, and even add Instagram-like filters to your photos.

People

Full size

The new contacts app—dubbed "People"—also brings this "magazine style", large-thumnailed view to Android. It almost looks Metro-like even, with the solid colors and giant tiles. Even clicking a contact card in another app will bring up their quick contact card with a giant picture of their face, which is pretty good looking. And, when someone calls you, you'll see a full screen image of their face, not this tiny-low-res-thumbnail crap that's been in Android for so long. Google Voice messages seem to show up directly in the people app, hinting that Google Voice integration might be much tighter in Ice Cream Sandwich.

One of the cooler new "people" features is the ability to send canned text messages when someone calls you. If someone calls you and you're busy, you can just send them a text message that says "I'm busy, call you later" (or whatever you want) with a simple swipe gesture. There are currently apps that'll do this for you, but it's really nice to have it built in.

Android Beam

Last, but not least, is Android Beam, a new "Bump"-like feature built into Android. If your phone has near-field communication (NFC) capabilities, like the Galaxy Nexus, you can just touch two phones together to send data instantly. You can send articles, maps, or even Market links from one phone to another just by opening it up on one phone and touching the two together, back-to-back. It's one of those features that's very cool, but not so practical yet—especially since not a lot of phones have NFC built-in.

Linus Torvalds on Android, the Linux fork

During his question and answer session at the Linux Foundation’s LinuxCon, Linus Torvalds, founder of Linux, revealed that while mainstream Linux and its popular smartphone and tablet son Google’s Android still aren’t as close as they should be, they’re slowly—ever so slowly—coming back together.

Over the last several years, some people have been seeing Android as not being Linux at all. Google didn’t help matters at all when in the fall of 2010, “Google engineer Patrick Brady stated unambiguously that Android is not Linux” That was never true. Android has always been Linux.

What’s also true though is that Google took Android in its own direction, a direction that wasn’t compatible with the mainstream Linux kernel. As Greg Kroah-Hartman, head of the Linux Driver Project and a Novell engineer, wrote in Android and the Linux kernel community, “The Android kernel code is more than just the few weird drivers that were in the drivers/staging/androidsubdirectory in the kernel. In order to get a working Android system, you need the new lock type they have created, as well as hooks in the core system for their security model. In order to write a driver for hardware to work on Android, you need to properly integrate into this new lock, as well as sometimes the bizarre security model. Oh, and then there’s the totally-different framebuffer driver infrastructure as well.” As you might imagine, that hasn’t gone over well in Android circles.

This disagreement sprang from several sources. One was that Google’s Android developers had taken their own way to address power issues with WakeLocks. The other cause, as Google open source engineering manager Chris DiBona essentially said, was that Android’s programmers were so busy working on Android device specifics that they had done a poor job of co-coordinating with the Linux kernel developers.

The upshot was that developer circles have had a lot of heated words over what’s the right way of handling Android specific code in Linux. Linus Torvalds dropped the Android drivers from the main Linux kernel in late 2009. This doesn’t mean that Android isn’t, but it has become something of a Linux fork.
That doesn’t, however, as some recent reports had it that Android and Linux are somehow in a fight with each other. Or, even, as one claim had it in March 2011, that Android was somehow in danger of being sued by Linux because of  Gnu General Public License, version 2 (GPLv2)violations. As Linus himself said at the time, claims that the Android violated the GPL were “totally bogus. We’ve always made it very clear that the kernel system call interfaces do not in any way result in a derived work as per the GPL, and the kernel details are exported through the kernel headers to all the normal glibc interfaces too.”

Still, it seemed as if Android and Linux were moving more on parallel paths than together, and that is indeed the case. At LinuxCon, Torvalds explained, that “there’s still a lot of merger to be done. … but that eventually Android and Linux would come back to a common kernel, but it will probably not be for four to five years.”

Kroah-Hartman added that one problem is that “Google’s Android team is very small and over-subscribed to so they’re resource restrained It would be cheaper in the long run for them to work with us.” Torvalds added that “I’m not at all afraid of forks… even when forks happen there are all these points of pain where two groups have had different issues, it just takes a while for people to join back, but the joining will happen. We’re just going different directions for a while, but in the long run the sides will come together so I’m not worried.”

Kroah-Hartman,pointed out that for years Google’s in-house Linux that it uses for servers, was a fork of the Linux 2.4 for many years. Torvalds explained that Google did this because they had made so many performance tweaks to improve it for Google’s search engine. He also added that many other companies tweak Linux for their particular uses. Fortunately, thanks to the GPLv2, all the significant changes come back to the mainstream kernel.

So, for the next few years, Android, while still a Linux, is indeed a Linux fork. In the long run, though, Torvalds is sure that Android will return to the mainstream Linux kernel. For better or worse though that may not be until 2016. Fortunately, for all end-users and almost all Android developers none of this will make any real world difference.

Vulnerability Found In Android That Allows For Phishing Scams and Pop-up Ads

You hated them on your PC and now those annoying pop-up ads and phishing attempts could find their way into an Android device near you. This year at Defcon 19 (a hacking conference held every year in Las Vegas) a couple of researchers managed to find a vulnerability in Android that could allow for apps in the Android Market to steal a users data via phishing or by be used by advertisers to bring the most annoying idea of the 21st century, pop-up ads.

Apparently, it’s possible for someone to create an app that will display a fake bank app log-in page while the user is using a legitimate banking app. Currently, apps that want to communicate with a user while a different apps is being used can only push an alert to the notification bar. But in the Android Software Development Kit (SDK) there is an application programming interface that allows for an app to be pushed into the foreground while another is being used.

The guys over at Trustwave have named this issue as Focus Stealing Vulnerability. Sean Schulte, an SSL developer at Trustwave explained how, “Android allows you to override the standard for (hitting) the back buttons.” Nicholas Percoco, senior vice president and head of SpiderLabs at Trustwave further explained that, “Because of that, the app is able to steal the focus and you’re not able to hit the back button to exit out.”

To further expose this issue, the researchers even created a proof-of-concept tool that is a game but also triggers fake displays for Facebook, Amazon, Google Voice and Gmail. They demoed the tool by showing a user opening up a legitimate app and then almost instantaneously, a “fake” login screen for Facebook appears. Percoco further explains, “With this design flaw, game or app developers can create targeted pop-up ads. The ads could be merely annoying, like most pop-ups are, but they could also be targeted to pop up an ad when a competitor’s app is being used.”

If you think you could avoid these apps by simply reading over the permissions page for a particular app, you would be mistaken. This kind of pop-up functionality is found in many legitimate apps and is known as an Activity Service.

Google has addressed this issue by stating the following,

“Switching between applications is a desired capability used by many applications to encourage rich interaction between applications. We haven’t seen any apps maliciously using this technique on Android Market and we will remove any apps that do.”

Nicholos Percoco responded by saying,

“Application switching is not the issue. The real issue is ability for other apps to identify which app is in the foreground and then decide to jump in front of that running app without the user giving it permission to do so. We also don’t see how they could determine the difference between a malicious app or a legitimate one since they would both look almost identical until a user reports it to them as malicious. The ‘wait until an app is reported bad before removing’ stance is dangerous and will likely prove out to be a fruitless effort as attackers could post apps much faster than Google could identify and remove them from the Market.”

I will now turn this to our readers. How does the potential of pop-up ads and phishing scams coming out of the Android Market sound to you? I’m not so sure Google’s statement is enough peace for me. Do you feel like Google needs to do more to address and further prevent this exposed Android “design flaw?”

Android Open Conference

Introducing Android Open

The Android juggernaut is gaining force and momentum, rocketing past the iPhone and Blackberry to become the dominant smartphone platform. And the opportunity goes beyond phones—Android is powering tablets, set-top boxes, and a host of new embedded and connected devices.

Android Open is the first conference to cover the entire Android ecosystem. Whether you're a developer, IT pro, business decision-maker, or marketer, you'll find the latest and best information for maximizing the power of the Android platform. But this new O'Reilly conference is not just about today's Android opportunity—it also spotlights tech, projects, and companies that point to Android's bright future.

Android Open is a big-tent meeting ground for app and game developers, carriers, chip manufacturers, content creators, OEMs, researchers, entrepreneurs, VCs, and business leaders to share best practices, tools, models, and lessons learned. If it's your business to create, sell, or market products in the Android space, if you're launching an Android-centric venture or need to take stock of the competitive landscape, Android Open is the place to be.

Insightful keynotes, practical workshops, and expert-led sessions will explore:

• Building Android apps: best practices
• Android internals—under the hood
• Development tools
• New frameworks
• Alternative languages
• Gaming and game development
• Enterprise solutions and considerations
• Performance and security
• Analytics and revenue models
• Multiple Android markets
• Promotion and consumer needs
• and much more

Android Open happens October 9-11, 2011 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco. Expect to encounter actionable insight, alternative hardware and services, announcements and product launches, and a "hallway track" that takes networking to a whole new level. Join with other Android professionals who are passionate about making the Android universe open, inclusive, and successful at the very first Android Open.

- Android Open

GTALK with video chat in Android 2.3.4 O.T.A update

Video Chat on Your Android Phone

Thursday, April 28, 2011 | 1:49 PM

Sometimes, the expressions on a person's face can mean much more than what they say. To help you stay in touch with your friends and family, we’re launching Google Talk with video and voice chat for Android phones.

You can now video or voice chat with your friends, family and colleagues right from your Android phone, whether they’re on their compatible Android tablet or phone, or using Gmail with Google Talk on their computer. You can make calls over a 3G or 4G data network (if your carrier supports it) or over Wi-Fi.

In your Google Talk friends list, a video or voice chat button will appear next to your contacts and you can simply touch the button to connect with them. Any text chats from the person you’re talking with will be overlaid on your phone’s screen so you can read them without having to leave the video. And, if you need to check something else, the video pauses automatically so you can go back to your phone’s home screen or another app. The audio will keep going even though the video has paused. Check out how this works:




Google Talk with video and voice chat will gradually roll out to Nexus S devices in the next few weeks as part of the Android 2.3.4 over-the-air update and will launch on other Android 2.3+ devices in the future.

- Google Mobile Blog

Android Apps on non Android Phones

The intriguing idea of running Google Androidapplications on non-Android phones is about to become a reality, courtesy of Myriad, a Zürich-based mobile applications software company.

At next week's Mobile World Congress event inBarcelona, the company will demonstrate its Alien Dalvik virtual machine solution, which enables phones running other mobile operating systems to use Android software.

The approach could be useful to consumers who own devices for which applications are limited, as well as help Android developers and carriers widen their audiences and boost revenues.

How could a non-Android device run software made specifically for Google's Android platform? It sounds like a stretch. In reality, all apps that run on Android phones or tablets run in a virtual machine, which Google calls Dalvik.

The solution is much like the Java Virtual Machine on a desktop: it's a constrained software implementation of a computer via software code. It brings greater security because apps in a VM are essentially walled off from other applications and from the device's operating system.

When the app in a VM crashes, it has no effect on other applications or on the operating system, ensuring stability. This video demo of Myriad's solution on a Nokia N900 running MeeGo shows that it performs on a level equal to that of the same app running on a comparable Android device.

Myriad's Alien Dalvik is a VM that supports Android applications, just like Google's Dalvik VM does, but it's one that can run on other devices. The company says that its first supported iteration will run on Nokia's MeeGo devices, which are also likely to be introduced next week—although they aren't likely to ship for some time.

Myriad has probably targeted MeeGo for its Linux underpinnings: Android too, is based on Linux, making for a bit of a common denominator. Palm's webOS is another Linux-based system; given the relative lack of applications when compared to other popular platforms, webOS could be a further target for Myriad.

Shadow of Oracle-Google litigation
Although its similarity to Google's Dalvik VM is clearly a positive, there could be a negative aspect, too. Last October, Oracle sued Google over the Dalvik VM, claiming that Google's implementation uses code stolen from Sun's Java VM.

Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems for $4.7 billion in 2009, gaining its Java virtualization technology and code. The suit is active and there's no indication yet if Myriad's VM uses any disputed code or if it has sought licensing or permission from Oracle.

If the Alien Dalvik solution delivers as advertised in the video demo—and if there's no fallout from the Oracle complaint—it could open Google's Android Market ecosystem up to a far wider range of consumers who use other smartphones or even higher-end feature phones.

Contrast that to Apple's iTunes App Store, which although it's the biggest platform store for software, serves only Apple iOS devices. Android software running on further platforms could draw greater developer interest in building Android applications. Carriers that adopt Myriad's VM on non-Android devices might gain a competitive advantage over peers that don't.

The proof will be in the pudding. Myriad will have to establish its Alien Dalvik as a viable way to get Android apps on other platforms. If Myriad does deliver, it could be a win for consumers, developers, and carriers alike—and could keep Android's general growth trajectory rising.