There has been lots and lots of buzz going around about Ice Cream Sandwich and I was yet to experience it and mess with it. Google had recently released its source and it was expected to see developers jumping onto to port it other devices.
@aospsgs2, a team of Android enthusiasts, have successfully ported it to the Galaxy S2. If you were waiting to get a taste of this Ice Cream, get on the wagon boy!
Although, it’s not complete yet, most of the features are working quite smoothly, like the new multi-tasking pane, new widgets, virtual buttons, newly designed People and Calendar app, gestures such as swipe-to-close-a-notification or tab or opened app or switching to advanced view in calculator and so much more.
How to Flash Ice Cream Sandwich on Samsung Galaxy S2?
Here’s a detailed guide to install Ice Cream Sandwich on galaxy S2. Or, forget flashing, here’s an Ice Cream Sandwich Transform guide for Android 2.x.
What’s not Working?
- Network Radio (Calls + SMS), WiFi, Bluetooth and maybe GPS also.
- Camera
- Notification bar doesn’t work properly.
- Files in the storage aren’t detected. No music, no photo, nothing.
- Text fields aren’t visible.
- No face unlock, in case if were wondering.
- Touch screen doesn’t seem to be properly calibrated. It sometimes has problems to differentiate between taps and swipes.
- Brightness and wallpaper can’t be set.
Update: Looks they’ve fixed network radio so SMS, calls (no audio) can now be received. WiFi should be working in their upcoming build. Source. Follow the team @aospsgs2 for latest updates.
In short, it’s not exactly usable right now, You can only play with it, mess with it for sometime but not use it as a primary ROM.
How Does it Feel
- It’s super smooth, except few things.
- The virtual buttons are awesome. They’ve been removed from the latest build.
- The multi-tasking pane is good but I’m used to the old multi-tasking pane on Gingerbread which shows all the opened apps in one view. It’s good, it’s cool but I would love to see a quicker way included too.
- The newly designed apps, Calendar, Calculator, People, Browser are really good. I hate the ugly look of old Calendar in Gingerbread but ICS has a lot better one.
- Gestures – amazing work. Tabs in the browser, notifications, opened applications and much more can be closed/cleared with just a swipe. I am yet to discover more gestures, hidden inside.
- Settings page is now more organized, along with a new data-monitoring app.
- The Google search widget is immovable. Y you force me Google? 0_o
And there are lot’s more to cover, I wish I had so much time for all of them. But for now, I would recommend you people to try it yourselves.
To Virtual Buttons or Not to?
Although virtual buttons are among the coolest features of ICS, the question of having it on devices with physical buttons confuses me.
- It’s cool but it takes quite some space on the screen, around 0.3”, leaving only 4” of screen-space.
- Both the buttons (virtual+physical) will offer the same function. So having both of them would be useless.
Either the virtual buttons could be removed OR some extra functionalities could be given to the physical buttons.
Update: Virtual buttons have been removed from the latest build!
What would you prefer, both Virtual+Physical buttons or just Physical buttons? Drop-in a comment below and lemme know.
