Gadgetory

hey guys it's Branham in a min from pocketnow.com Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich brings a lot of new features to the table menus have changed there are new ways to customize your device and in this video we're going to share with you our favorite Ice Cream Sandwich tips let's get to it so just to start things off a lot of these tips will be focused on speed and performance and making your Ice Cream Sandwich device feel faster so let's get to the tips now so Android Ice Cream Sandwich has an entirely new launcher and the launcher has a persistent Google search bar on top we get a total of five home screens you can only have five you can't have two or one or seven if you'd like you can have up to 16 icons in the main area and then an additional four icons in the doc but that's all and with the high resolution screen of the Galaxy Nexus you kind of want to have more icons because the screen is so crisp and clear it has that many pixels additionally in the new version of Android Ice Cream Sandwich you get a new dock and the dock will show you a finite number of icons and when you slide to the right you get a kind of a 3d view but what if you have 10 pages of icons what if you have a lot of apps installed on your device well you're going to be swiping and swiping and swiping to flip through your application tray and of course widgets is now included as part of the application tray as well which also has that animated look and feel but what if you want more icons on your home screen and more icons in your app launcher to make it easier to find the apps that you're looking for well you can install a third-party launcher on Android 4.0 just like you could do on previous versions I've actually gone ahead and installed launcher pro here one of my favorite launchers of course there are many launchers like ADW launcher IX out there and now I can have 30 icons on my homescreen and I even took away the text labels to give it that clean look I've limited to one homescreen there are no other home screens of course I can have two three four five six seven if I 1 and 2 with launcher Pro additionally launcher Pro has a different dock a different application tray so now I can see more icons on the screen at one time I'm back to that vertical list and thanks to this really high resolution screen I can see a ton of icons on the screen at one at one time much more than the default built an Android 4.0 launcher so that is tip number one install a third-party launcher and be able to take away those animations and see more icons on the screen at one time so you're flicking around less and getting to what you want to more next thing to talk about is screen animations and previous versions of Android you'd have to go into display settings over here to turn off screen animations not the case an Ice Cream Sandwich you actually have to go to development down here developer options you scroll down a little bit you'll see something called window animation scale and you actually get a huge range so if we go to 10x things become really really animated but if you turn them off what you'll notice is things become more instant it feels faster when you turn screen animations off of course you're taking away some of the eye candy but in my opinion it makes the device feel a lot faster when you turn off screen animations then there's another item here transition animation scale can turn that off too that determines the animation when you transition from one app to another that was tip number two number three is the lock screen in all previous versions of Android you had to have a lock screen in Android 4.0 you get a new lock screen choice facial recognition or you can turn it off completely which is fantastic so here we are in settings though we can go into security and screen lock and here's a new option none and I've chosen none so that when I turn on my device hmm I get right into what I'm going to do you might be thinking well what if you accidentally hit a button in your pocket well of course this is a capacitive screen so there unless there are any fingers in my pocket that are touching my screen which isn't the case I won't have any missed presses so I like the to leave the home screen off certainly it's a bit of a security issue if you find yourself leaving your phone out if you're at a college or university you might want to leave on the lock screen especially with one of the security features but if you like to just get to your phone you know where your phone is all the time turning off the lock screen can really help you to get to that piece of email or go to that website even faster next thing I want to talk about is browser tab management it changed in Ice Cream Sandwich so here in the browser we can go into tab management by going to the tab button I've got the little quick control set but of course you can open up the tabs with the tab button and let's open up a new tab and then open up a new tab you can have up to 16 tabs open an Ice Cream Sandwich which is really fantastic but what do you do if you want to close them well we've got two choices you can hit the X here or you can just swipe them off the screen very intuitive way to close the tabs and you are back to square one and of course if you close the last tab it thinks you're closing the app completely along those lines to exit applications and this is a very obvious thing of ice cream sandwiches an obvious feature so of course we have the multitask UI and did you know to turn off applications to force close them you can actually swipe them out of your task list so if you've got an app that is using a lot of resources or that has frozen or you just want to take out all of the programs that are in memory you just swipe them off the screen through the multitask UI and they are gone and one final tip for Ice Cream Sandwich took me a long time to figure out where the phony settings were I use Google Voice so when I set up a new phone I have to change the voicemail settings and I was looking at settings and I couldn't find it well where our phone settings it's actually in the phone application so here in the phone app you'll find three dots and you can press settings and boom that will take you into phone settings it's a little bit hidden and out of the way but it kind of makes sense actually to have the phone settings in the phone itself though it would be nice to have it in the control panel so that was a look at some tips and tricks for Ice Cream Sandwich users out there that want to get the fastest experience possible again not everybody wants to have it fast with no screen animations certainly some people like to have the eye candy there which is totally fine hopefully you enjoyed these tips if you like this video please give us a thumbs up and if you want to check out our full Galaxy Nexus review it's been posted check the description and you'll get right to it that's it for now