Information is still coming in but Google and Samsung just showed off Android 4.0 aka Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS). Coming first to the Samsung Galaxy Nexus which will feature a 4.65” HD Super AMOLED display technology at 720p resolution and a 1.2GHz dual core CPU, ICS looks to finally bring a little pizazz to the robotic OS.
A lot of the new "look" to Android 4.0 can be tied to Matias Duarte, who worked on Palm's ill-fated webOS UI till he was snagged by Google about a year and a half ago. Because of that, it seems quite obvious that things like Android's new calendar and especially the "card view" for multitasking look very familiar (something that even Windows Phone "borrowed"). We not sure making the card-view vertical instead of horizontal is going to fool anyone though. Other things like the People App and even the camera also look heavily borrowed from Windows Phone. Heck, they even said "Putting people at the heart..." instead of "Putting People First", so yeah.
Reader Anthony submitted the following observations he noticed during the recently YouTubed Keynote:
- Swiping between menus instead of tapping them is Metro
- action bar is copied from wp7 (especially making it common between apps, is exactly what Metro is)
- photo album UI looks exactly like WP7 gallery
- contact groups is from WP7
- people app is direct copy of wp7 people's hub
- folder creation method (dragging two icons together to make a folder) is from iOS
- Lock screen to camera is from WP7/iOS (which iOS copied from WP7)
- switching reply method between email/sms/call in contact card is WP7 (Actually, webOS did that 1st -ed.)
And in general, the consensus at least from the Twitter-sphere seems to be yes, Android borrows a lot. We always said Android was pretty ugly so this at least goes a long way to addressing that though we're not convinced that it's as elegant, smooth or as unified as the Metro design language. Just see the Windows Phone version after the break for comparison...
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