I’ve been using Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0.2) for about six weeks now (or is it 5?), and I’m now able to write a mini-review.
The Good
The system is overall much more polished than 2.x. The global user experience is surely good (but I already expressed some perplexity on the recent apps switcher button).
For someone who listens to music while commuting like me, the sound quality is satisfactory, and anyway much better than that of the HTC Desire.
Battery life, after a few charge/discharge cycles, is quite good. With my typical usage I get to the end of the day with around 40% of juice still available. With limited use and a WiFi connection, the battery easily lasts for 2 full days, perhaps 3.
The Bad
It’s somewhat unstable. I don’t know if it’s the combination with the Galaxy Nexus, but I experienced several resets of the phone in a number of occasions. I couldn’t identify a pattern, but it seems something related to high memory usage.
Launcher (the application that displays the home screen, manages icons and widgets) crashed a few times, typically when updating apps.
Moreover, just yesterday I noticed that the WiFi connection was being dropped when the phone was idle, to be reactivated as soon as I turned the screen on. A reboot fixed the issue (the uptime was around 12 days).
The Ugly
When a phone call arrives, it takes forever before the phone displays caller ID information. The phone rings and vibrates, the led lights up, but screen remains dead for 2 or 3 seconds.
Animations are quite annoying after a while because, even if they’re very smooth most of the time, they’re too slow and inconsistent when navigating across screens. I’m not sure if it depends on apps, but the end result is a bit disappointing.
The Verdict
All in all, it’s a pretty decent mobile operating system. I think it’s starting to show some aging problems, but nothing too worrying (for now). 4.0.4 should fix the instability issues, and is being rolled out now, but I read reports of a much worse problem causing cell signal loss in idle (so I guess rollout is suspended for now, in fact it’s still nowhere to be seen for me). I bet we have to blame Samsung drivers.
Side Note
It’s more and more frequent that mobile operating systems have critical bugs and issues, often impacting devices’ ability to function properly. This is very bad, although inevitable as they get more complex and sophisticated. All software has bugs, and while that’s normal, it shouldn’t be considered right and we should demand fast deployment of updates (and with fast I mean happening in days, not weeks or months). I would expect much faster response times from at least Google…