Ice Cream Sandwich served on a Galaxy

[Drillbit]

My Galaxy S2 got its Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade over the air. Still looks like the old Touchwiz but added a few cute tricks. The famous ICS multitasking menu is now there. Icons are refreshed with new profiles. Cute approach to the lockscreen where the circle unlock now appears anywhere you touched the screen. You can feel the Ice Cream Sandwich kinetics all over the interface.

Performance took quite a boost with ICS. Quadrant up to over 4000 from 3000, Nenamarks 2 over 50 fps from 44. Sunspider down to 1700 from 3200 (lower is faster) and Browsermark up to 133k from 52k, higher is faster.


Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2

[weegie]

I don't mind ICS on the SII, definitely a couple of improvements like quicker access to data on/off [HTC is still better] the browser being quite a bit quicker loading.
Some parts of the interface have improved smoothness, some like the inbuilt music player are less so than before, wifi and data takes longer to establish a connection for some reason.
Was hoping it might have sped up the camera focus but it hasn't, can't say I've noticed a massive decrease in battery life like a lot of users who were scurrying back to GB roms did.
Uses quite a lot of ram although that may be just because all the crapware is back on it after the upgrade, root permissions lost once again...sigh.
Overall it's just a bit different to GB, certainly not some must have quantum leap like it seems to be constantly made out it is, ICS might be for bare android of old missing a ton of niceties out of the box but SII users aren't going to be doing anything more than they were before on GB.

[Drillbit]

I am detecting better battery life on my device actually, no difference on Wifi speed connections whatsoever. As for the inbuilt music player which is nice, I don't really use it, since I prefer to use the Google Play Music player. I don't see any added ware on my device. If there were, they are most probably Google's like Google+ or Earth. But then I already have them installed before.

As I like to take screen shots, shifting from Home button + Power Button to Lower Volume Control button + Power Button is less convenient for me.

Activating the Multitasking Menu via the Home button turns out to be more intuitive than on the Galaxy Nexus.

The biggest complaint I got from users so far is that the basic appearance remains Touchwiz, and its not as sexy as the raw ICS UI. On the other hand, I think doing this way is much more convenient for most users as they won't have that much of a UI shock compared to the raw ICS. Just moving from my EVO 3D or S2 to the Galaxy Nexus I can feel the UI shock, especially the way some menu buttons are relocated.

Some nice additional touches. I like the fact that when a battery is fully charged, you now get a notification via the curtain.

[weegie]

Yeah, the blind is a lot better now as it's not as stubborn at flicking down and particularly back up, why they don't put the data switch there like HTC is a bit strange though

[Drillbit]

Did you ever get ICS on the Sensation? I heard its very nice.

T-Mobile HTC sensation 4g ICE SCREAM SANDWICH 4.0

[weegie]

No I sold it before the update was available DB.
I re-rooted my SII today and then promptly killed touchwiz by removing something it didn't like being removed, then had to download and install another rom because I couldn't recover a working device again...actually, I had to do this twice because I did the same thing a second time, still don't know exactly which app caused it.Is interesting my device had a standard German language which complicated things no end when I tried a hard reset initially when trying to get it to go as I couldn't decipher my way through the setup to fix the language

[Drillbit]

Yeah, the blind is a lot better now as it's not as stubborn at flicking down and particularly back up, why they don't put the data switch there like HTC is a bit strange though

They put the data switch on the menu with the power button, which was actually HTC's own practice on their earlier Androids.

I get the feeling the notification curtain is too cramped already for a data switch. As for HTC, they seemed to have overloaded the notification curtain and if you remember, they have to implement a second tab on the curtain where the settings and the data switch are.

[Drillbit]

I am quite impressed with the way S2 moves with ICS. I wonder how the Note would perform with ICS, given the uptick in clockspeed, though countered by the increased resolution. The ICS OTA for the unlocked generic Note is now pushing globally.

[weegie]

Note isn't as smooth as the SII on GB [obviously a pixel pushing thing] hard to imagine it would be any different on ICS,
it would be interesting to see if there's any difference in s-pen performance though.
I think the battery life is a bit better on ICS after using it for a while, at least in standby, might be a bit more thirsty when actually using it though.
I found out what was causing Touchwiz to fail and it was me removing the social networking widget hehe, why an application widget is tied to the UI is pretty bizarre.
With the blind and data switch, I wouldn't mind losing auto rotation or bluetooth to have the data switch instead.

[Drillbit]

Battery life with ICS in my experience on the S2 seems better than GB but far from Transformer Prime, even on idle (down only to 98% in nearly 6 hours). Even when running on the same OS version. In fact, neither does my Galaxy Nexus or even my single core Nexus S with ICS are able to match the quad core Tegra3 powered Transformer Prime on idle. My idle test is basically leaving the devices for hours on wifi, just syncing the same stuff among all of them like email. The results totally debunks for me the quad core eats battery more kind of reasoning.