Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich: First look

Contacts

Contacts in Android Ice Cream Sandwich have been completely redesigned from the previous version of the OS and are now called just People. The look and feel of the application feels more dynamic and social than before, showing you the status of your friends from GTalk and their status message.

The social element is deeply integrated in the People's app, allowing you to add different connections to any contact, like for instance including them in a circle on Google+. In a single contact view, there's a large profile picture, which should make the experience of viewing contacts more engaging.

List of groups and single contact view in Android Ice Cream Sandwich

Messaging

Since Ice Cream Sandwich is parts Gingerbread, parts Honeycomb, the message apps feels practically unchanged. The keyboard is the same as that found in Gingerbread and that's not a particularly bad thing.

Error correction and word suggestion have been revamped and are now more accurate and can even detect double-typed characters, skipped letters and ommited spaces.

Word correction in Ice Cream Sandwich

Another revamped feature is the Speech-to-text, which now lets you talk for as long as you have air in your chest and it'll still keep on recording and transforming your speech into text. After you are done, the voice engine automatically underlines words it thinks might have come out wrong so that you can fix them if necessary.

Email

Android developers have spent quite some time making the Gmail application more intuitive and easier to use. As a result the application looks more streamlined and straight to the point without too much visual noise attacking you.

Notably, the people autosuggestion has been also improved and now shows a picture next to the suggested contact. With the new screenshot-taking feature in Ice Cream Sandwich, you can take a screenshot of your phone screen and attach it directly in the email as you are writing it.

Composing an email

With the new Gmail app, you can also set up quick responses and use them when composing. A great usability issue has been addressed by adding nested mail subfolders, which should help you locate and organize IMAP and Exchange emails. With the new Gmail app comes a resizable widget in pure Honeycomb spirit, but in an Ice Cream Sandwich execution.