TechStuff takes a bite out of Ice Cream Sandwich

That didn't sound like a scooter crunch to me. No, we're gonna talk today about ice cream sandwiches, but not the tasty, chilly treat that can give you an ice cream headache. Oh no, this can give you a headache of a totally different nature. That's just that's just guess work by me. I was actually used it yet. Um. Now we're talking about the latest build as of the recording of this podcast, the latest build of Andrewid's mobile

or Androids operating system. It is a mobile operating system. Uh, it would officially be Android four point Oh yes, ice cream sandwich. Yeah. If you are not familiar with the Android operating system, this is, of course the smartphone and tablet operating system that Google produces. Uh and ever since they got out of alpha and beta, they've named their various builds after tasty desserts. So we had cupcake, doughnut, Claire, froyo, gingerbread,

and honeycomb up to now honey Yeah, fantastic. So the nice neat thing about ice cream sandwich to me or what I think? It's kind of interesting is that? Okay?

You you remember when Honeycomb debuted, right, and there was some excitement, but there was also some grousing because Google already has a bit of a black eye about all the different versions of Android that are out on the market, right, yeah, there, Well, it depends on what phone that you have, too, because some of them, uh is is it easy to find a good deal on an Android phone? But you'll find out in a lot of cases that you are one

or more versions of the operating system behind the cutting edge. Um, and a lot of people were finding uh, you know, hey, I got Android and it turns out that it's not as the phone isn't as robust and can't handle as advanced in operating system. So people are out there with a variety of different kinds of phones UH running a variety of different operating versions of the Android operating system.

So like this, this is one of the things that really differentiates Android from iOS and Apple's approach because Apple is in charge of of UH creating the hardware and the software. So it's a marriage between hardware and software where the hardware is going to support the software because it was designed to do so from the ground up, and vice versa. The software is designed to work on that hard to to optimize for that hardware. So Apple in a way, you know their system. It means that

you don't have as much choice. Really, you have the latest iPhone that you can purchase, or you can purchase an iPhone that's usually a generation or maybe two generations older. But but they're all iPhones. You know, it's all gonna have the form factor that is common across that generation of hardware. You know you're not gonna find any variation beyond that. But but it does mean that and you know you're less likely to be outpaced by the operating

system at least significantly. I mean, older versions of the iPhone are not able to run the current version of iOS. But because contracts come up and usually two years in the United States, the think thinking processes. Well, you're not gonna be you know, left behind for very long because once your contracts up, then you can upgrade to the latest hand set and you'll be able to use the latest operating system. Google it's different because Google does not

create right now, it's own hardware. It even though there is the the possibility that Google will purchase Motorola Mobility and so maybe in the future we will see that happen. Right now, that's not the way it works. The way it works is that various handset manufacturers across multiple countries

and carriers are creating devices that run Android. So some of those devices can run Android up to a certain point, but beyond that they aren't capable of running Android because the operating systems resource demands are greater than what the hardware can provide. So, for example, some of the earliest Android phones that came out had an upper limit of Android one point six. They couldn't go beyond that. Now we're talking about Android four in this podcast, so you

can see that you would be left far behind. So because multiple manufacturers are making these handsets, they're coming out all the time. You know, an iPhone a new iPhone comes out in general between twelve and eighteen months as scene. Uh, a new Android phone comes out every couple of weeks, right, it seems like so well, especially right now as at the time we're recording this podcast, we've had some very

high profile device is released in the last two weeks. Yeah. Yeah, So in that case, you could go out purchase your brand new Google phone with it's with the highest running operating system that you can get at on that phone at that time, and then two weeks later you can find out that there's a new phone that's just been released that even makes the one you just purchased. Look. Uh,

you know, well it may not look pathetic. That would be going too far, but it may Yeah, it may not have as it may not be as fully featured as the newest phone. So that can be very frustrating. Well, Google's have a lot of criticism directed to it because directed at it, I guess I should say that because it had, you know it, it had created this this operating system where there were so many different versions out there on the market. Not all of this is Google's fault.

It that it created something that we call fragmentation, where you know, you could have three or four people all with Google devices, getting a room together and realize that no two of them are running the same version of the operating system. And then you get on top of that, you've got things like you've got the ability of carriers to overlay their own um you user interface on top of the Android operating system, and it makes the fragmentation

even greater. Well, then when Google released Honeycomb, which was a tablet operating system, it was designed optimized for tablets, not for smartphones, they got even more criticism because now you have a smartphone operating system and a tablet operating system, both of which Android. Yeah, so now the fragmentation is even worse. Well, ice Cream Sandwich moves to help resolve that, and that ice Cream Sandwich is bringing together the operating

system of the tablet and the smartphone. They ideally the ice Cream Sandwich operating system build of Android will equally well on tablets and smartphones and we will start to to have a resolution of this fragmentation. And just in case you guys are curious, yeah, there are Android tablets that are on the market that actually run older versions of the Android operating system, versions older than than Honeycomb.

So there are some versions out there where uh, they're running the smartphone operating system on a tablet and people were complaining about it. They said, you know, this really doesn't feel like a tablet operating system, and that was that's why Honeycomb was, you know, Google's answer to that. So, well,

this is the optimized one. And now ice Cream Sandwich is taking everything they've learned from designing smartphone operating systems and tablet operating systems and combining it into a single package. So in that way, it's similar to Apple's approach with iOS UM and in another comparison to iOS and I know that I've well, I've read criticism lately about how uh Android stands alone and shouldn't necessarily be compared to iOS.

But it's it's inevitable that it would draw these comparisons because they are the two leading operating systems for smartphones and tablets at the moment um. Uh. They they have said to that UM ice Cream Sandwich is designed to be more user friendly, uh and easier for people who are not familiar with smartphone and tablet operating systems to get in. UM. You know, one of the the strong points of Android is that it is more open and it has a lot of advanced features that UM the

iOS UH doesn't have or didn't have up until iOS five. UM. But at the same time, UH, some people have criticized it for being so complex that newbies can't jump in and use it. UH ice cream sandwich is supposed to uh to help with that. UM. One of the features I I think that people will really like, especially new people, as the face recognition for the unlocking of the phone. Yeah,

that's kind of cool. The idea here is that, yeah, you face unlock, you hold your phone up to your face and they're, you know, assuming that your phone has a front facing camera, which the the Google Nexus, which is the what they're talking there. That was the phone they featured, uh ice cream sandwich. When when Google was actually talking about ice cream sandwich, that was the phone they were using. Was Uh, it's a Samsung phone, as I recall, and UM, so they would it has a

front facing camera. You hold it up to your face and assuming that you're in a well lit area where the camera can actually detect the contours of your face, it will unlock your phone. Once the facial recognition software verifies that it's you. Now. This does raise some questions, Yeah, like could you fool the facial recognition software by holding

up a picture of someone? And like the person who owns that phone, if you hold up a picture of that person to the camera on the phone, would the picture be enough to fool the facial recognition software, because we have seen that happen in other devices that have

facial recognition software. I rememb ended specifically of some vending machines in Japan that sold cigarettes, and the cigarettes, you know, there's an age limit you have to be a certain age in order to purchase cigarettes legally and so, but they found and they, in order to get around that, you know, have so that kids would not just walk up to the cigarette machine and buy cigarettes, they included a camera that would use some facial recognition software not

to identify someone, but to determine if that person was old enough, just looking for specific kind of features and saying, all right, well, this is someone who is clearly has some years under their belt, so they can smoke if they want to. Don't don't smoke kids anyway. Uh. They it was discovered that if you just took a picture of an old person held the picture up to the camera. It would fool the camera and you could purchase as

many you know, smokes as you wanted. Kids don't smoke, don't, don't do it anyway, So the question is, could the facial recognition software on this this Google device be fooled by a picture? Also, what what if? What if you? What if you have an identical twin? Could the identical twin pick up your phone and then unlock it using his or her own face? Also, for those of us with zz top like facial hair, what happens if we shave?

Are we no longer able to access our phone? Does it say I don't recognize you, go away for six months and come back and try again. Well, he's got legs and he knows how to use them. Nice. But but even even if that does happen, even if it gets to a point where let's say it's too dark, just a simple scenario, it's too dark for it to work, you can still unlock your phone using one of the more traditional ways, like the finger swipe type stuff where you have to draw a pattern or whatever. You can

still do that. So it's not like you're going to be bricked out of your phone because you ended up, you know, changing your face around. I remember my need of that Muppet machine that would you were to pull you pull the nose off and put on another one. You know, you can actually do that. At the Center for Puppetry Arts, they have a puppet thing where you can change out eyes and noses and mouths. It's awesome. So, um yeah, that's a pretty cool feature. The facial recognition.

I agree. Also, voice recognition technology has become really important with Google. Now. It's interesting because this this this leads to comparisons with Apple's Siri and Siri. And when I say Apple's Sirie, Apple actually purchased the company that created Siri, but you know they're incorporating it into iOS um Now. Siri is has got a sense of humor and a personality sort of. I mean, it's artificial, but it's there.

It's been programmed in minds, artificial to your your personalities, artificial. I felt I thought it was felt a little plastic, but uh, they the Google Voice version. There are ways where you can operate your phone through using just voice commands, just like you could with Siri. But there's not that sort of personality that quirky since there and it's not as it's not as deeply integrated as it is with Apple's product, but you can do a lot of that

stuff on your Google phone. One of the things I thought was kind of cool though, is that with Android ice Cream it has real time speech to text UH recognition, So if you hold up the phone and you're talking into it, you'll see your your words start to appear on the screen as you're talking. Now, with older versions of Android, what would happen is you would you would activate your phone, you turn on the little microphone icon,

and you would speak into your phone. You would stop speaking, you would get a little loading page as it was sending the data to the cloud to be analyzed. The cloud would send the data back down and then you would see the result and it would be whatever you said in full. So if you're dictating a fairly long email, then you're not going to get a chance to actually

see what's coming up until you're done. Now, with ice Cream Sandwich, what's doing is it's doing real time streaming, so it's streaming the data up as it's receiving it, hitting the cloud, analyzing it, and sending it back down while you're still talking. So you could be dictating a very long email and you're gonna start seeing it appear after you start talking. Now, that might actually be distracting for someone, but it's also a way to say like

you can review what you're saying immediately. They also highlight words or underlining words that uh that have a lot of hominems, especially with depending upon the way you speak. So if I say a word and uh, and you know it's the way I say that word, maybe I get a little mush mouth syndrome going or something, but I say the word in such a way that sounds

like another word. If Google is not sure of the word you said based upon its contact and your pronunciation, you'll get this little underline under it, and if you click on the word, it'll give you multiple words to choose from that are hominems of whatever it was you said, so you can pick the correct word for that particular context. So that's kind of cool that, you know, it's not just going to put in one word when you said something else. Oh, they're they're Jonathan. Yeah there you go. No, No,

they're Jonathan. There their castle. Uh. So you don't get that because you still haven't seen that movie. Um, but Yeah, that that that was one of the features I thought was really cool. The facial recognition was neat, the voice recognitions neat. Uh. There's a lot of other things that they've they've included with this update to the operating system. The camera now has some added functionality. Yeah, that you

can you can edit a lot. You have a lot more capacity to edit photos, and you can edit stuff like the simple things like removing red eye and that kind of stuff and cropping photos. But you can also do like the hipster layers where you make things look posters and stuff and yeah, you're so hip. Apparently Jonathan

doesn't like that. But you can also do panoramic shots where you hold the camera up and you start taking a photo and you just you pan to the left or to the right, or even I guess across the sky if you wanted to, and you you wait until you get all the way to where you want to end, and then what will happen is that the ice cream sandwich has software in it that will allow it to stitch together all the various pictures that you've just taken by slowly panning. You don't have to do anything the

camera's doing at all. Uh, and it will stitch it together into a panoramic photo. That's pretty cool. Yeah, no, it's pretty neat. And also it has the features that we've come to expect with a lot of the most recent digital cameras and smartphones, like tap to focus. If you've gotten multiple, uh, multiple things in a frame, you can tap one of them to to tell the camera this is what I actually want to take a picture of.

This Their stuff is kind of background and that's helpful, and of course like digital zoom and that kind of stuff. Um oh, and apparently the shutter speed is there's like no delay or very little lag between when you hit the camera and when the photos taken, which is that's that's fantastic. Yeah, I have I don't know, have you ever used a phone that had a camera where there was like a noticeable delay from when you tried to

take a picture to when the picture was taken. On my phone, it takes about a second, and that can be that can be enough for it to mess you up, but it's enough. It's long enough so that you can miss a moment you were trying to capture, or more frequently, in my case, i'll take a photo think that the photo has been taken, start to move the camera and that's when the camera takes And that's so I mean,

I I'm a victim of my own impatience there. But this is uh with ice cream sandwich, they've really optimized the camera software so that it'll take that photo much more quickly. Now, some of that's also going to depend on the hardware. And again we said Android can be

used across multiple kinds of hardware. So sometimes you'll you'll come across an Android handset that might take phenomenal photos, and you might come up with another one where the photos just look grainy and just there's the low resolution where they just don't they just don't look good. And some of that is due to the hardware limitations. So even though the software supports it, unless the hardware is comparable,

you could still have a less than ideal experience. Uh So some other stuff that they've included an ice cream sandwich, there's anything else in particular you want to talk about. I was just gonna start hitting some of the other features, but if there's one or two that you really like, we can focus on those. I see what you did there. Um, I think one of the ones that I've seen most people interested in is Android Beam. Ah yeah, beam is

pretty cool. Yeah, Now, I mean immediately when I saw that basically, Android Beam gives you the ability to um uh give people information from your phone when it's in proximity to another one. And the the demo I saw, they actually had the two phones touch, yeah, which reminds me of Bump. Yeah. It also reminded me of squirting. Yeah,

the old the old Microsoft Zoom. So so you you might say, well that, you know, we've had that for a while, you know, that's that's I hear that on from both sides when somebody else introduces a feature, Oh, you know a sirie. Oh Android, We the Android people have had that for years, cut and paste. Yeah, well, but an Android Beam. You know, I thought of Bump and I thought, well, you know that's not something. In fact, Bump is you know, cross platform. Yeah, however, this is

this is more than just that. Though. You can transfer all kinds of files um with Android Beam, and they've built it into the API so that developers can create applications that take advantage of this. So here here's some examples that you could use this this technology. Let's say, all right, basic example, I I am listening to a song on on a Pandora or something like that, and the Pandora's built in the API where I can actually share my playlist with someone else or my station with

someone else. And Chris has the same kind of He has a phone that also has this capability. Right now, by the way, Google Nexus is the only phone that can do this because you have to have near field communication yeah built into it, and yeah and yeah. But as we see more NFC phones come out from using Android, then I'm sure we'll see this used in various handsets, and hopefully it will be completely compatible across all handsets, so that way I'm not limited to just other people

who own the same type of phone that I do. Alright, so let's say that I've got this song or this playlist playing and I want to share it with Chris, and I hold it up to his phone, and then now his his Pandora has access to the same playlist the same station that I have created. That's a simple application.

Or the one that I saw in the demo was that I was, you know, someone's watching a YouTube video, they hold their phone up to someone else's phone, and now the second phone picks up and and is able to watch that YouTube video at the same time. But let's let's say let's put it into a game and say that you've got a game on your on your

your phone. That is, let's say it's a role playing game, and it's a role playing game where it's essentially a massively multiplayer role playing game, but you know, with limited interaction with other characters. And then I hold up my phone to your phone, and our characters meet and exchange stuff so that we each of our characters comes out stronger than they were before. And that that's kind of a cool little feature that you could you could build

into a game using this um this this technology. Now there's other stuff too. You know, you can transfer notes and you can do all sorts of things. It's it's a neat way of being able to to manage data without having to set up an email or or some sort of foul sharing service. Um it makes it really quick and simple. And because it's using near field communication, it's it's secure in the sense that you don't have to worry about you know, you're transferring this across a

public WiFi hotspot or something. It's you know, unless someone's right up on you, some way of being able to read your your communication, then you're you're pretty much okay. Yeah, somebody's running uh to you trying to touch your phone with theirs. That maybe a sign that something is wrong. It's an indicator that there you may need to pay attention to what's going on around you. I'm on base, you can't tag me. Uh so yeah, that that was another feature that that I've seen a lot of people

talking about. Um, let's see, let's see, there's the go ahead. I was gonna say. The app management, too, is supposed to be improved. Um. One of the concerns that a lot of Android users have is that, uh that they have little knowledge of all the stuff that's running on their phone, and they all of a sudden they have no battery because they have sixty three apps running and you know, I don't need that thing open. Uh why

is it still running? I told it to close? Um, And I find that kind of frustrating with my Android. Have you have you seen some of the screens for the data management? No? I actually haven't they really get they drill down, because what will happen is let's say that let's say that you are just curious to see how you um, how you've been using, like how much

data you've been using. That that's a concern too, because a lot of plans have a limit on how much data you can use per month, but not every phone is uh not every upbrating system makes it easy to determine how much data you're using. Well, ice Cream Sandwich has it built in where you can go into a data management app and take a look and you'll see how much data you've used up to that point and end. It will even break it down and show you which apps are using the most data and when. I would

really like to have that option right now. And yeah, it does it as line graphs, it does as pie charts. It gives you really a good idea of where your data usage is coming from. And if you want, you know a lot of if you have a cap on your data limit and you don't want to go over it, you can actually set a hard stop on your data usage and when your data usage hits that, that's it. Your phone won't let you use data unless you override the limit you've set, So that way you don't have

to worry about it. Was getting close to the end of the month and suddenly your phone tells you know, you don't want to do this because if you do, you're gonna be paying a truckload of money like an overage fees. So that's kind of cool. Yeah. Things that allow you to manage your apps better so that you you maximize your battery life and you you don't go over your data limit. Those are really thoughtful. Uh features.

You want to know another small, small feature that that's related to that that I really like the idea of what's that I understand that with ice cream sandwich. If you have a device from a carrier that has bundled a whole bunch of stuff on your phone that you don't want, that it will allow you to uninstall anything from your phone. See right now, unless I root my phone, I cannot remove three or four applications that I never use that my Uh they're on the provider put on

there and I can't get off. I have the same I've got a few I've got a few apps that are on my phone that I never use, I don't imagine I will use, but I can't uninstall them unless I root my phone, and I don't do I. People often ask me why I don't root my phone because

I'm a tech guy. I don't root my phone because I use my phone so frequently for so many things that I don't want to run into the situation where I have a fatal crash and I have to restart from factories, you know, go back to factory settings, and I don't want an instance where that happens and it throws me off. That's the problem is because I use my phone for everything. I mean, I use it for work stuff, and I use it for my own personal use.

It is my personal phone, um, but I use it for I use it for everything, so I can't I don't want to take the risk of a rooting something and then and then having an app mucket up. Yeah, I just I needed to work when I needed to work and not. Yes, so yeah. Another another thing that's interesting hardware buttons. They're gone, you know, instead of there's there's a little section at the very bottom of the screen when you're looking at by the way that the

Google Nexus has an enormous screen. It's like four point six inches, um for for a smartphone, that's pretty big. But at the bottom of the screen you'll have a back button uh, and like a file button and the home button. Um, there's no more menu button uh down there as there were with older Android funds. And these are not actual button buttons. They're on the screen and when you get to certain views those just fade away as well. They are contextual buttons. Uh. So that's a

little different. That's actually kind of neat because it gives you even more screen space and uh that makes apps, you know, more more useful. Um. And then there's some other basic housekeeping type stuff like folder creation, which is something that Apple folks have been using for a while now. But the way you create a folder in an Android ice cream phone is that you can drag a an icon of an app on top of another icon and let go, and it will automatically group those two icons

together in a folder. And then you can name the folder whatever you want. So you can put all your social apps in one folder and you call it social and that way, you you know, you manage that you don't have a cluttered screen on your on your smartphone when you open it up. Um. So yeah, there's lots of other neat little features like that. I'm sure we're

gonna learn more as we get closer. Oh. One of the most important things that I heard was that, um that apparently, ah, if your if your phone can run uh Android two point three, which is gingerbread, it will be able to run ice cream sandwich. That's what I understand. And so that ice cream sandwich will be released for all the phones that can run gingerbread. Uh. Although the schedule of that really state is is largely up to the actual carriers, So some of us may be waiting

around this time next year for gingerbread. Finally, someone's looking at directly at me while well, other people have ice cream sandwich. Um. Well, hey, to be fair, I have not had gingerbread for very long and uh, and ice cream sandwich is now going to be the next new thing. And hopefully they will really roll this out. It's not just the carriers either, it's also the handset manufacturers. There's a lot of work that goes into rolling out the

updates to the operating system. I can only hope that they will incorporate this as quickly as they can, because I would love to get my hands on some of these features. I mean a lot of the stuff. I mean, I don't know that my hardware could support everything that ice Cream Sandwich promises, but I would at least like the chance to try it out. Yeah, I would too. Um,

of course I need gingerbread first. Um. I thought of one other little thing I forgot to mention, which is not a huge deal for most people, but it's um it's nice. Uh. You can resize widgets now, so you know, you get a widget you put on your screen. Yeah, if you which is great depending on you know, the size of screen you have. You might not have a Google Nexus which has that enormous screen, and you might want you know, well, I just need enough of this

widget to show like a Gmail widget. You might want it to show just one email message at a time. And so you you can actually resize the wind does so it does that and you that frees up more desktop space or phone top space so that you can, said, you can put other apps up there. And you know that that that applies across to all the widgets. And this was kind of I think that was something that they carried over from Honeycomb, that you could do that on the Android tablets, but you couldn't do it on

the smartphones. Until ice Cream Sandwich rolled around interesting or plopped around I guess ice cream sandwiches don't really roll. Not really depends on the shape. I guess if you get a round one, yeah, I've seen some round ones. Yeah, but it's it's it's promising though. The operating system I think is is really maturing with these with these new features, and um, you know, I think this is definitely a step forward. And uh, it's probably not as much of a shot across the bow to i OS as it

is too uh Microsoft and BlackBerry. Yeah, as far as keeping why even keep shooting BlackBerry? I mean they're sinking on their own well enough, shot themselves in the foot, right, Yeah, they're plugging more holes in that boat. Then there's more holes than boat at this point. Maybe they'll turn it around though, like we said in our our Rim podcast, it may very well turn out that BlackBerry gets the

last laugh. But right now, I just don't think that that's necessarily so when you go after I guess I guess what Google could go after is to try and get into the enterprise market plus, where BlackBerry really still is firmly entrenched. So if Google can do that now, granted, most of these uh, these these features that we've talked about are really aimed at consumers, and these are really

consumer friendly features. But for example, the face face unlock is not going to work for enterprise because if it can be fooled and there's proprietary information on that phone. Yeah, that's that's that's what we call a bad thing. Yeah, so yeah, there, we'll we'll have to see. But uh, I am interested to see how this turns out. I mean, I am an Android phone user, so of course I'm I'm eager to get hold of this on one of my own devices, or maybe my next Android phone will

just natively support it. It will still be a while. I'm under contract for another year, so it'll take a little bit before I upgrade. Yeah, your next phone will be running jelly Bean or whatever it is. It's going to be starting with K. Yeah, maybe we'll be like, I don't know, Koala custard with a K Kala custard now would be that I guess that would be an Uben two thing. Yeah, well closer to it. Yeah. Anyway, Well that'll wrap up this discussion. Oh uh did you

hear what their new type face is called? Al Right, everyone, that wraps up our discussion about Android. In your head, I scream sandwich. Um. I hope all of you enjoyed this. If you have a request for a specific topic that you would like us to tackle, let us know on Facebook or Twitter. Are handled, there is text of h s W or you can shoot us an email. That email address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com and Chris and I will talk to you again

really soon. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you