Gadgetory

all right what's going on Android lovers this is Clayton over at Android Authority comm and today we're going to be showing you the Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system head-to-head with the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system now a lot of you guys know that the Ice Cream Sandwich operating system is available on the Galaxy Nexus and they're pushing it out to a lot of phones recently now I know some of you guys are still waiting and because of that the majority of you are running on Android 2.3 Gingerbread like this Samsung Galaxy S so I'm just going to show you the basic rundown on these two operating systems and put them head-to-head against each other first off you're going to notice that the user interface on each of these is extremely different now the very first thing that stands out is that the fonts on Ice Cream Sandwich are in a font called Roboto now this is something new that Google has pushed out to the Android 4.0 operating system and it looks really nice um mind you I am using a separate home launcher for the Gingerbread operating system here I'm using ADW launcher because the TouchWiz or the motoblur or the HTC Sense are all going to be the manufacturers own variant on Android 2.3 and since we're pitting it against a vanilla version of Android 4.0 I'm going to be using the ADW launcher in order to you know get a fair comparison now first off we'll just scroll through our tabs here as you can see they're both pretty smooth but the Android Ice Cream Sandwich has a few more fancy transitions now that is because I'm running Apex Launcher but I have not changed the transitions whatsoever from the stock Android 4.0 you can see down here we have capacitive buttons on the samsung fascinate so with Android 4.0 Google was going with a more onscreen approach to soft keys now they both work just about as fast with the Android 4.0 being a little bit ahead now I don't have these devices bloated up with anything whatsoever so I just thought I would do that to give you guys a good comparison anyways I'll compare our drop-down menus here you can see that on Android 4.0 we have the option of disabling or hiding our toggles here and we have a whole row up here we're on the gingerbread we have this row up here and they're kind of just obtrusive there they're not as sexy as the Ice Cream Sandwich toggles okay so I'm downloading an application to each of these phones just so I can show you guys the difference in the notification bar when we're actually downloading an application I don't want it to happen too fast because I want it to actually get a good view of what the notification bar looks like when we have that so as this is the difference in our status bar pull down status bar now you see right here that on the status bar for the Android 3.2 you cannot click and swipe away to remove notifications you can only click and open the notification but here on Android 4.0 we just slide to the left or right to remove those and the same with our task managers now what we would do to kill process to kill apps that are running is open up our task manager on Android 4.0 by pressing our open windows button and we can just swipe left to right to remove them now on the samsung fascinate running Android 3.2 we would have to download a third-party applications manager and with that it would also kill our home app see this does not count home launchers as apps that are running to kill but here if I were to press X it would kill our atw launch Ori X okay so next to compare our our widgets our folders at our multitasking functionality so if I go to the left here I've added a calendar widget on each of my phones here now as you can see the calendar has been completely redesigned for a nice clean user interface on the Android 4.0 and it has the old gingerbread design here on the Android Gingerbread operating system now I have the same exact item on each of them it's both Tuesday April 4 but you can see that it's a nice minimalist design over here and it's kind of a you know gaudy design here on the Android 3.2 now the functionality with replacement home launchers is the ability to resize widgets so I can edit here and I can actually make this bigger or smaller or wider and I can also do the same here on the Ice Cream Sandwich and I'll just go ahead and make that an entire page and it'll make this one entire page so they both don't look terrible but you can see that the user interface and the redesigned perfectly clean Android experience here on the Android 4.0 is a little bit nicer and it's definitely improved so next on our list is the ability to add folders now with the Apex Launcher I'm running here we can create a folder right from the home screen by dragging an item so I'll drag Chrome Beta and I'll drive the clock and you just hover over another icon and it creates a folder once you open the folder you can name it whatever you want is click folder and you can choose new folder and it's right up there and you can bring browser over to the new folder and books over to the new folder so now we have browser and books folder but it's definitely not as nice-looking as the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich um it's kind of obtrusive it's just a bland little you know folder right there and this is this nice clean user interface that we have going on with the Android Ice Cream Sandwich alright so next I'll just go through the display of the settings menus on each of the operating systems as you can see on the Wi-Fi for the Galaxy Nexus Android 4.0 it's different than the samsung fascinate which aggregated it into a bunch of different wireless and network settings now we'll go back to the wireless and network here on the fascinate and see that that's where you'll access your airplane mode and your mobile networks and opposed on the Android 4.0 your mobile network and data is actually monitored and you can put a cap on it and you can kill background data so here it can show you everything that's consuming your data how much you have consumed as well as the warning limit there and you can set a data limit here and when you do that you can choose as I said previously to restrict the background data on applications so you can restrict background data for the Google Play or anything else that's consuming your mobile data going back we will go to the sound settings on the Android Gingerbread operating system as well as on the 4.0 and you can see that there's a somewhat significant differences and on the 4.0 we can disable dialpad touch tones and vibrate on touch which is the same as haptic feedback for Android Gingerbread where we can actually change our vibration intensity and the audible selection as well as audible touch tones okay next we'll go to our storage options and on the Android Gingerbread is the SD card and phone storage and on the Android 4.0 it'll show you a breakdown of everything go to the language and input and language and keyboard we're here you can choose your default keyboards on both of them but it's a different setup and user interface next we'll go to our settings about phone menu where you can see we're running 4.0.4 and you can see I'm the gingerbread running firmware version 2.3.5 so next we'll go into some of the developer options included in Android 4.0 that are lacking on Android Gingerbread so you can choose what gets root access as well as a mock locations a couple other stuff like show touches and that shows you where your finger is actually touching on the screen you can show the screen updates in case you have any dead pixels you can show the CPU usage which shows it up there in the top right corner you can force GPU rendering for 2d hardware acceleration you can also choose to kill apps via your back button and that's basically it you guys I hope you enjoyed the review and if you did check out more from Android Authority com