Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minimun from pocketnow.com in this video we're going to give you a tour of Google's Android 4.3 and 'which let's get to it so if you want to run this on your own computer will link to a video that shows you how to run the emulator on your own computer and a little bit of a preface when you run the emulator it will be slow so that obviously doesn't represent the speed of ice cream sandwich it's just the fact that you're running an emulator on your computer so let's get started you might be wondering where are those virtual buttons that are present on the Galaxy Nexus well in the emulator you don't get those virtual buttons we have buttons off to the right you can't see them in this frame but what's going to happen is when ice cream sandwich comes on to legacy hardware hardware that's already out there the home button tap and hold of the home button will bring up the multitask you I because you might have seen that the Galaxy Nexus has its own multitask button so that is a bit of explanation so here we have the home screen you I for ice cream sandwich and we can swipe to the left I'm not actually going to swipe I'm going to just click on the left button here on the on the d-pad or on the keyboard whichever is easier for you and just like standard Android but there's a lot different for example let's move this email shortcut over here you'll notice a lot of things are taken right out of the honeycomb holographic you I so if we tap and hold on this bookmark with widget which looks exactly the same as honeycomb we can resize it just like honeycomb and just like honeycomb we can resize it here we can scroll through this widget kind of like a mini application very nice so let's go into the application list and actually let's go into the notification tray first they've redone the notification tray now with the notifications you can swipe notifications individual ones off of the screen if you want to deal with them later so if I swipe that it's gone imagine having having 10 notifications I need five of them you want to deal with five of them you don't care about with the swipe it really helps you sort of hone in on the notifications that you want to action on later now I've actually set up my email my personal email with this device so it's got my contacts has calendar and email so everything's working it's pretty cool I can actually show you everything or most of the functionality so let's go into the application tray first before we talk about email contacts and calendar here's what it looks like when you want to pick a nap if you want to put it on your home screen just like gingerbread you tap and hold and boom you can drop it on home screen or you can put it on another home screen kind of like in honeycomb so let's go back to the previous home screen the main home screen here let's go back into the app tray now we have widgets up here and it does crash from time to time because you know it doesn't work perfectly so we're going to go back into the app tray here and go to widgets one more time should work there we go so here are the widgets now they are stored within the app tray rather than within the within another menu system on the home screen so we can scroll through our widgets tap and drag them to the home screen just like you can do with individual apps now I mentioned the multitask you I if you tap and hold the home button or if it's a device like the Galaxy Nexus you will have its own button so if I tap and hold the home button you'll see up comes a task switcher that looks just like honeycomb in fact it's the same one you're supposed to get little previews of the programs here but in this case you don't probably because it's kind of buggy here but you can flick through with your finger the recent most applications that you've used pretty cool way to flip through your applications it's going to be great if we hit the menu button on the home screen we will get these three items kind of a consolidated list we've get we have wallpaper manage apps and system settings and here's a very familiar wallpaper picker that we've seen from other versions of Android and let's jump in to settings now and I should mention that settings is now a shortcut in the notification tray so I click on settings up there and boom here we are scroll to the top and see what we have we've got this really cool data usage area and didn't want to go there so we can actually see which program us are using which data usage super cool especially for people that aren't on unlimited data plans you can also specify to get an alarm where to shut off your data completely if you reach a certain threshold of data use and we really can't do much here with that it's not set up obviously we're not connected to a real network here so let's go back and all of the other settings just look different they're basically the same so if you go into sound it's just a beautiful interface here using the new Ice Cream Sandwich system font Korean checks kind of inherited from honeycomb going to display same kind of options that you would get in Gingerbread and it's starting to get a little bit slow here so let's go down to battery see if we have anything there same kind of thing with battery so again a lot of the same settings just a different look and feel let's jump into the calendar now and see what that looks like where the calendar preferences okay so here is what agenda view looks like and it should actually be I guess color-coded here on the left if you have multiple calendars but I only have one so it's gray what we can do is we can change to month view week view Dave you kind of like any standard calendar and it shows you with little little gray bars whether you're busy that day what time of the day you're busy and so on and so forth so much improved you I there let's jump into email and hopefully there's nothing crazy in there okay so here we are in email and it's just an improved email interface again it comes right out of honey cone when you check a certain item you will get these buttons along the bottom here and they're pretty self-explanatory so I'm going to trash this item and it says message deleted it goes away if we click the menu button will get some settings let's take a look at the email settings get the general email settings message text size let's see what it looks like on tiny auto advanced choose which screen is show after you delete a message simple simple things here and if we go back it should change this text size or not so let's go back to the home screen and check out a little bit more of the features here so we've got a doc along the bottom which contains the phone by default here's the new phone dial pad let's see what it looks like when you call someone so let's call one eight hundred collect Co ll e SI t give them a call and take a look at the new phone UI and here here it goes being huge picture if you've got a picture caller ID associated with this person a big red end call button and your typical options in here as well dial pad speakerphone mute hold and add another caller and so go back to the home screen here and let's go into contacts real quick now contacts like a lot of honeycomb like a lot of ice cream sandwich apps has this sort of pivot like thing which kind of reminds us of Windows Phone 7 so if we swipe to the right we can see favorites and we we have this kind of tabbed interface along the top and we can either get to those tabs by tapping individually on the tabs or we can do that swipe to the right and if you had pictures associated with these contacts they would come up with beautiful pictures and there are some pretty cool stuff that has happened in Ice Cream Sandwich to contacts will have a full rundown of that we actually get a device in here with ice cream sandwich that is a lot smoother in operation than this emulator so again that was a look at Ice Cream Sandwich google has gone a long way to improve Android to make it look a lot nicer more elegant again we'll post a link on the video here on how to run the emulator on your own it's the kind of thing you could spend 20-30 minutes messing around with you'll find all kinds of cool stuff in there so if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and thanks for watching that's it for now