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Hi, and welcome to a WhatTabletPC.com overview of Android 4.0 on a table PC. It’s the Ice
Cream Sandwich release and what we’re going to do today is quickly give you an overview
of some of the new features, the main features, with this release.
So you’ll notice on the lock screen you’ve got a couple of different options now, you
can either unlock the tablet or jump straight to the camera. What I’m going to do first
of all to do is show you, unlock the tablet and you go straight into the home screens
but if you had other apps open at the time you locked it down, you’d jump to those
and actually to give you an example, I’m just quickly going to jump in to the camera
app and you can see straight away it takes us into the app where you can take some video
or take some pictures. Now also with this release you’ve got some
quite nice refinements and improvements to the interface, we’ve got a slightly different
font that’s easier to read on the tablet and generally we’ve got some nice polish
to the operating system, so for example, we’ve got this multi-tasking kind of bar here which
quickly jumps you through the apps you’ve got open. Before you had a little cross you
had to tap on which was a little fiddly to use. Now you just swipe these and you can
get rid of them pretty quickly. So that’s fairly straight forward.
Also, we’ve got the introduction of folders, so for example, I’ve set up a folder here
you’ll see you’ve already got games in this one. I’m going to quickly take these
out to show you how it’s put together, largely drag-and-drop as you’ll see from the moves
I’m making here. So this is what you’d have on the screen if you had lots of apps,
widgets, etcetera, that were a bit messy. Now you can put them all into folders. So
say, for example, I just want to grab some of these apps and put them into a folder.
First of all, you just press on one, keep your finger on it, drag it across to another
one, and it creates a folder straight away. You can see there’s two apps within that
one. If I click out of that one and grab another one, hold it down, drag it in. Similarly grab
another one, hold it down, put it in, and we create this much bigger folder. You can
also rename these folders so they are a bit easier to locate quickly, so that’s just
some games. Quite easy again to undo those as I showed
you as I was just playing around with this. O
ther improvements, we’ve got an enhancement to the gallery application. You’ve got a
nice kind of interface here for accessing your videos or pictures. I’m going to quickly
jump into this image here and use some of the new effects that have come in here. So,
for example, you can jump onto edit, and this is all new, so you have the options to play
around with the photos, change some of the effects to the photos—that one’s quickly
jumping over to black and white—you can quickly jump on to other options. You can
change saturation, all those sort of things, jump on to sepia, etcetera, similarly then
you’ve got other things like face glow, face tan, other kinds of effects, you can
straighten, change photos around a bit and just generally play around with it a bit and
get it exactly like you want it. So that’s the kind of edit function within the gallery
app. You’ve also got some enhancements to the
camera app. So here I’m currently start on taking still pictures. There’s also the
option to take some other video or panoramic view, where it stitches lots of pictures together
to create a longer view. You’ve got the option to zoom there, jump
on to the settings and you’ve got settings specific to still camera, so you’ve got
things like flash mode, white balance, exposure, scene mode, camera settings, etcetera, some
of that was around in the previous version. What’s new for this version for Ice Cream
Sandwich is though on the video camera stuff here we’ve got things like effects you can
add as you’re going through taking video, various bits and pieces there to enhance and
play around with your video. You’ve got other settings like time lapse, video quality,
torch mode, white balance, and various other different settings. So that’s the camera
app. Also now, other sort of improvements are things
like the on-screen keyboard. So if I jump into Polaris Office there, what I’m going
to do quickly is just set up a new file, that’s a Word file, up comes the keyboard—it’s
a slightly different design—you get a bit of haptic feedback as you’re typing. I’m
just going to type the name of this tablet. It’s much better at catching your kind of
taps on the keyboard and also the kind of suggestion tool is a lot more intelligent
than it was previously. As you can see, you can actually get some reasonable typing speeds
on this and it’s just more accurate than in general.
Now if I jump back out of this, let’s show you there’s a range of Google apps that
are already stuck in a folder at the bottom of here and I’ve got a few widgets, etcetera,
selected and I’ll show you the new kind of apps and widgets screen.
So here we’ve got apps and widgets area. Apps, fairly easy to drag stuff out of here
and get it to one of the home screens, so just again, touch on it, hold it down, drag
it in and it snaps in there. Similarly, on the widgets, you can select a widget—I’ve
selected bookmarks—pull that right in here. Of course, with these widgets—certain specific
ones, of course—you can carry on resizing. So you just hold it down, resize the widget,
make it bigger to your needs. So that’s the kind of main features for
this new Android 4.0 update. I’ll be back in future videos to give you details on what
Android is capable of. We’ve also got some other reviews on the site WhatTabletPC.com,
so pop over there if you want to check out some of those reviews. If you like this video,
press like or subscribe to the YouTube channel and we’ll bring you some more fairly soon.