Flipboard was made for them, as it creates a magazine like experience based on your subscribed feeds. Initially Flipboard was created for iOS and made some big waves as it just makes reading feeds so much more sexy. When Samsung presented the Galaxy S 3 recently they also announced Flipboard as an exclusive app (for an unspecified amount of time) which comes preinstalled with the latest Samsung flagship device. Thanks to a XDA user which extracted the Flipboard apk everybody can try out the Android version now.

On initial setup you can either choose between a number of different Flipboard news categories and add them to your list or search for any RSS feed. Furthermore you can also integrate Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, 500px accounts and more.

Flipboard quickly pulls new articles from all selected sources and presents them with big nice pictures. As first entry you’ll find the cover stories tile with a selection of the most popular articles from all feeds.

On the start screen you can either touch a feed or the Cover Stories tile to access the articles or swipe upwards to access further pages of your feed overview. When switching to the second page you will also realize why this app is called Flipboard as there is a pretty nice paging animation. Articles are stripped nicely from the websites and presented without all the distracting elements like animated ads and banners. One feature which is missing from Flipboard is the option to download and convert full articles automatically from teaser RSS feeds. When opening a teaser feed you can switch to the browser mode to view the website with the full article. While this solution is ok I’d rather like to see the whole article in the native Flipboard view which is optimized for reading.

There are also two different widgets available, in small and medium size. Both can be changed using the Android 4.0 built-in widget resizing feature. But they basically only show one article at a time and you have to cycle through each entry by touching the refresh button on the lower right corner, which makes them pretty useless for me.

Flipboard does provide the option to forward articles to services like read it later, instapaper and readibility though if you want to get back to specific content later.

Overall this is really one of the most polished magazine readers on the market, so its nice to see Flipboard arrive on Android. Even though I still use NewsRob as my main RSS reader, Flipboard is perfect for a couple of other sources I follow infrequently. If you are interested in consuming news with great magazine visuals you should definitely give Flipboard a try.

Android 4.0 ICS for tablets – Homescreen

The homescreen didn’t change all that much visually. As with Android 3.0 you can place app shortcuts, widgets and folders on the pages. Creating folders is much easier now by just dragging and dropping one app shortcut on another, and notifications can now be swiped away separately. Using the multitasking view you can still see a vertical list of screenshots representing the recently used apps, and either jump directly to an app by touching the screenshot or swipe away the entry to close the app completely.

Scrolling between the homescreen pages is smooth, as well as opening apps and folders. I’m still a big fan of the Tron like UI footprint which can be seen through the whole Android 4.0 OS. ASUS redesigned only some details like the navigation icons, but other than that everything looks very much stock Android, which is a good thing.

Android 4.0 ICS for tablets – GMail

Using GMail on a tablet is really fun thanks to the multi-panel view which can show a list of folders and emails at the same time. Labels, conversations views and nearly all other GMail features we know from the desktop browser version are perfectly supported here. One new feature is switching between emails by swiping horizontally, which makes navigating through a lot of unread emails easier.

One of Androids strong points was always the Google service integration and GMail for tablets proves it.

Android 4.0 ICS for tablets – Email

Google still holds on to the concept of having two separate email clients for GMail and all other mail accounts. Both apps share the same general layout now, but there are some feature differences.

Using the regular email client you can pinch to zoom within emails which is a very nice and handy feature. This is not possible in the GMail app. On the other hand you won’t be able to go through your emails by swiping horizontally, instead you have to make due with regular arrows to navigate to the next or previous email. I’m not sure why there are still feature differences between the email client and the GMail app, but hopefully we will see them merged in future Android versions.

Android 4.0 ICS for tablets – Contacts

The contact list is finally nice to look at, after years of neglecting on Googles part. It adapts the general blue ice cream sandwich theme and provides big contact pictures on the detail pages.

Furthermore it’s possible now to link contacts to Google Plus accounts which will result in a second page for each contact showing recent status updates from Googles new social media service.

Android 4.0 ICS for tablets – Calendar

Similar to the smartphone ICS version the calendar app provides four different views. Day view, week view, month view and agenda view which is an infinite scrolling list of upcoming appointments. I like the month and agenda views especially as they provide the most information within one view.

This is one of the best Google apps out there IMHO because all views make sense and you have a large amount of options to configure calendar entries and syncing to Google, Exchange server as well as other accounts.

Android 4.0 ICS for tablets – Browser

It seems like Google is going to integrate Chrome for Android as default browser sooner or later, but at this point the Android 4.0 browser doesn’t have to shy away from a comparison. Chrome is still in beta stage and lacks some important features of the ICS browser like dynamic text wrapping and flash support. Ice Cream Sandwich also introduced the incognito tabs which allow anonymous browsing and the possibility to easily switch to desktop views of web pages. Another handy option is the offline saving feature which can be used to store pages and read them later.

Rendering speed and overall performance is very good, although not as fluid as the Safari browser on an iPad. But you have flash running pretty stable within the ICS browser, which is an important feature for many customers. Compared to the smartphone version you’ll notice that the tabs are always visible on the top of the screen, so there is no real full screen view, unless you activate the quick controls in the browser labs options. By swiping from the edge of the screen inwards you will be then able to access a popup menu with all relevant navigation options. This way you can always browse in full screen mode as the tabs are not visible with quick controls activated. I started out with the classic view, but after a while I tried out the quick controls and they really work nicely so I stayed with them.

Android 4.0 ICS for tablets – Gallery

No big surprises here. If you know the gallery app from the smartphone Android 4.0 versions, you know the tablet version too.

The gallery seems to be a tad faster than the Honeycomb version, but it’s not a huge difference.

Android 4.0 ICS for tablets – Youtube, Google Music

Furthermore Google updated most of its apps to adapt the ICS UI guidelines like the tab navigation on the top as well as soft buttons to access app options.

Other than that there are no big differences between the Honeycomb and ICS versions of YouTube and Google Music.

Android 4.0 ICS for tablets – Camera app

Using a tablet to make photos isn’t a very frequent use case as most people wouldn’t really want to use such a big and heavy device to take snapshots when nearly all phones today come with pretty good cameras. This is also the reason that no manufacturer has bothered yet to build a tablet with an expensive camera. But Google updated their camera app anyway with some UI changes.

It’s nice to see that Google didn’t forget this, but i doubt it will change the fact that people don’t seem to care about the camera feature on tablets.

Android 4.0 ICS for tablets – Video Studio

Basic video editing is of course also possible with Android 4.0, but don’t expect much more than some video cutting features.

Everybody experienced instances where some quickly taken movies with a mobile device looked nice, but you would like to delete or edit some shaky part of it before sharing with your friends and family. This is now possible with Android on-board functionality.

Preinstalled apps on the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer TF101

This review is based on the Android 4.0 update for the Eee Pad Transformer TF101, and while ASUS didn’t go for an own skin, they still added some additional apps and widgets to the mix. The good news is that they didn’t overdo it. Most of the apps are meant to provide functionality which is missing on Android out of the box. Like the ability to backup your apps and the settings, or streaming media to other devices.

But some of the additions aren’t that great though. It seems like every manufacturer wants to provide an own app/media store in some form, and ASUS is not different. You get a preloaded eBook reader with access to a store to download books or magazines. I just don’t see the need to use this service when there are much larger products out there like Amazon or Google Books. And of course a cloud storage service can’t be missing too, as you will get unlimited ASUS web storage (for a limited time). Since Google jumped into the file cloud storage business recently with Google Drive, I can’t picture a lot of people opting for ASUS. You can be sure that Google will integrate Google Drive in all of their services and most apps on the Play Store will support it too. But for ASUS and other manufacturers own cloud services this won’t happen anytime soon.

Android 4.0 for tablets – The Verdict

ASUS decided to keep most of the pure Android ICS UI in place and didnt change a whole lot. You’ll only find some preinstalled apps which aren’t too intrusive. I love the fact that ASUS doesn’t force their own skin on Android without any real need, as this also helps them to provide updates faster than others. Too many Android device manufacturers think that they need to have an own skin to differentiate from the competition, but at the same time most of them don’t have the experience or expertise to create good user interfaces. This backfires more times than not. I think pure Android 4.0 works very well on tablets, not only for tech savvy people but also for casual users. Google did a good job of fixing most UI issues that Android 3.0 Honeycomb had, while keeping the stylish Tron aesthetics. And you can clearly see the influence of webOS design mastermind Matias Duarte, as the whole user experience is much more streamlined and all Google apps have been revamped to fit the new UI direction. Android has finally achieved such a polished UI that 3rd party skins are pretty much obsolete at this point. While manufacturers like Samsung and HTC might not be too happy about this, it’s good news for the customer tired of the Android fragmentation issue. Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich for tablets doesn’t need to hide from the competition when it comes to user interface quality or overall performance, even though iOS and Windows Phone might still be somewhat easier to understand on first glance.

For more screenshots check out the Android 4.0 screenshot gallery and if you want further Ice Cream Sandwich details take a look at my Android 4.0 review for the Nexus S.

This will put a lot of pressure on Dropbox which is currently one of the most successful cross device/OS cloud services out there. Recently Microsoft also updated their Skydrive app for Windows Phone devices and Apple provides the iCloud service for a long time now. So it will be increasingly harder for small companies like Dropbox to compete with the big players.

At this point Google Drive as well as Skydrive are far behind the usability of Dropbox though. The fight for the cloud just has begun.

The Eee Pad ASUS Transformer TF101 is a 10.1 inch tablet with 16 or 32 GB storage, 1 GB of RAM, nVidia Tegra 2, 1 Ghz CPU, GPS, a 5 MP camera on the back and a VGA front camera. Furthermore you have a micro SD card slot to expand your storage as well as hardware volume buttons, a HMDI slot and earphone plugs. Using the keyboard dock you have even more options which i will list later. It’s good to see that ASUS follows a much more open strategy in regards to hardware interfaces compared to Samsung which seems to aim for a walled garden like Apple and doesn’t even support basic standards like micro SD card slots.

Compared to the Motorola Xoom or an iPad 2 the ASUS Transformer feels a little bit less tightly build, as you will find it creaking every now and then. So even though the built quality is not bad, its clearly not in the iPad league.

Power and volume buttons have been placed on the left side of the tablet, while the USB slot can be found on the keyboard dock.

On the right side you’ll find the earphone plug, HDMI slot and micro SD card slot. Regular SD, SDHC and even MMC cards can be put into the keyboard dock as well. ASUS really delivered a full set of slots you can use to transfer data between the Transformer and other devices. As far as i could see this works very well, as i had no issues with different storage media.

The IPS Gorilla glas display with a resolution of 1280*800 pixel has good viewing angles and nice color reproduction, but reflects light too much. Interestingly it seems to become smudgy very fast and swiping the fingerprints away was much more difficult than on other devices. I’m not sure what the reason for this is, but it looks like ASUS didn’t use an oleophobic coating for the display.

With its widescreen format it’s natural that you would hold the tablet primarily in landscape mode, especially since Android 3.0 and 4.0 are optimized for landscape viewing. Portrait mode is also possible but feels strange as the transformer is a little bit too long for my taste. On the iPad 2 and Kindle Fire both orientations work fine, since the iPad has a different screen ratio and Amazons tablet is only 7 inch which also helps. And even though the Eee Pad Transformer is not as heavy as the Motorola Xoom it still is a little bit too hefty for me. I think that we will see much lighter 10 inch ASUS tablets in 2012.

I was skeptical at first picturing the Transformer and keyboard dock as laptop replacement. Initially you’ll be doing a lot of stuff with the touchpad and cursor until you realize that all important Android buttons like home, back, menu or lock are available on the keyboard. Additionally you can use gestures on the touchpad. One example is to switch the homescreen page by swiping two fingers horizontally, or vertically to scroll through webpages. After a while it works really well, even though the keyboard can’t compete with the best laptop keyboards out there regarding haptics and feel.

Besides the fact that ASUS added a lot of slots and interfaces I mentioned earlier, the keyboard also has an own battery which can be charged to enhance the battery live of your tablet greatly when put into the dock. So taking all aspects like interfaces, battery and of course the hardware keyboard into consideration the dock really provides a lot of additional value.

The Eee Pad Transformer TF101 was shipped with Android 3.0 which was Googles first attempt at a tablet UI. And while the general style was quite good, there were a lot of strange usability decisions and instability issues. Luckily Android 4.0 was just rolled out so I will take an in-depth look at it on my next review.

The verdict

Even though the Transformer Prime is the current flagship and the next generation of ASUS tablets also just has been announced on the mobile world congress, taking a look at the older Eee Pad Transformer makes sense if you are looking for a good and cheap device with Android 4.0.

It has solid hardware specs and a great display. Together with the keyboard dock you have a combination which will work well for basic use cases like surfing, writing, media consumption, instant messaging and video calling. This will cover most relevant use cases for a lot of people, but there are also some things you won’t be able to do at this point. When writing this article I wasn’t able to batch upload pictures using the WordPress web administration. Seems like the flash upload has problems with the Android file system. Furthermore you can’t install desktop software like the Android SDK, Word, Powerpoint and Excel. So while the Transformer with dock will cover some main use cases, it can’t fully replace a real desktop/laptop OS like Windows or OSX.

If you think about getting a tablet which can be used as a laptop for basic use cases, you should take a look at the ASUS Transformer series. ASUS recently rolled out the Android 4.0. ICS update (review coming soon) for the TF101, which keeps the tablet up to date with the latest Android features and apps. So if the price point is important too, then the Eee Pad Transformer TF101 could be what you are looking for.

The Kindle Fire stock rom experience

Let’s start with the most basic case, using the Kindle Fire without any rooting or hacking. After the first boot you’ll be able to provide your Amazon Account credentials or create a new one. It’s possible to use your regular non-US credentials too. Amazon created their own bookshelf like launcher which is separated into four areas. There is a search bar located at the top, and beneath you’ll find shortcuts to different Amazon services like Newsstand, Books, Music, Video, documents, an apps list and access to the web with the Kindle Silk Browser. At the bottom you can define 4 fix app shortcuts, and swiping up the shelf will show more of them.

Going through the offered services it’s obvious that you won’t be able to use most of them as non-US customer. There is no streaming service available in the rest of the world, and the same is true for newsstand. And while you can buy music in Germany you won’t be able to sync it with the Kindle Fire.

Another problem is that you won’t be able to download apps from the Amazon Market with a non-US Amazon account. And there is also no official way to access the Google Android Market too. This really lessens the functionality of the Kindle Fire out of the box.

At least the browser is working fine and you can use the Kindle Fire to surf the net without any problems. Flash is supported and you have the option to let the Amazon Silk browser pre-render webpages on their servers to gain speed. The effect is not very big, and i wouldn’t really want my data to be processed on Amazon servers first so i deactivated the feature in the browser settings.

There are also a handful of other Kindle Fire optimized apps pre-installed like the Amazon Marketplace app, Kindle Reader or an email client.

Most of them really work well and i especially like the Kindle Reader app for comfortable ebook reading. But there are also some flaws, like the fact that you can’t even add an exchange email address in the email app.

Using the credit card workaround

Normally you wouldn’t want to use only pre installed apps, so the question is how to install apps from the market even though you live outside of the US. One workaround is to create a new amazon account and provide random created credit card information alongside a virtual US address. This way you will be able to install apps from the market. But handling with fake credit cards is illegal and therefore i will not provide any links or further information. If you don’t want to bother with rooting your device you’ll be able to easily find instructions for this approach using any web searchengine.

Sideloading apps

An even simpler method is to download the install files of apps (APK Files) and manually install them on your Kinde Fire. You just have to change the security settings and allow installations from unknown sources. But using this way you won’t be able to get many paid apps legally or receive updates automatically, so it’s not a comfortable solution.

Rooting the Kindle Fire

The Kindle Fire is a very solid piece of hardware out-of-the-box but a little bit hampered by the software it’s shipped with. And for customers outside of the US there is basically no better way to fully unleash the potential of this device than rooting it. There are many rooting tutorials out there but i can recommend Android Police as a good source to get going. It’s important that you are a little bit tech savvy as rooting the Kindle Fire includes working with a tool called ADB (from the Android SDK) as well as some command prompt usage. This is no rocket science but neithertheless you shouldn’t be somebody who is afraid of technical vocabulary. By rooting your device you will lose warranty as well, so you should be very sure about what you are doing before taking any action. And there is always the chance that you brick your device without being able to restore it, so you have been warned.

It was a pretty much straightforward experience for me to root the Kindle Fire, the only real problem i had was the fact that ADB (which is the tool you use to communicate with the connected Android device via command shell) didn’t find my device. Only changing some USB driver settings manually helped to solve this issue. But after that it was not that complicated to follow the guide from Android Police.

The first thing you will probably want to do is to replace the pretty boring and inflexible default app launcher. Finding the apk file from a free launcher with any search engine isn’t hard, and i started off with Go Launcher which instantly made the Kindle much more usable for me. But having the best launcher doesn’t help if you have no access to apps.

Installing the Android Market

As using the Amazon market is not possible without going the fake credit card route, the best alternative is of course the official Google Android Market. Getting the market to work on the Kindle involves installing the framework APK as well as the Google Market APK. Taking a look at the tutorial on XDA Devs should get you covered.

This is really a big step forward for all non-US customers, as having access to the huge Android Market app selection will finally make good use of that great hardware you just got for 200 bucks. Most apps install without much problems, but there is a little issue since the Kinde Fire never was supposed to access the Google Android Market. It’ won’t be identified correctly by the market, which will think that this is an incompatible device for some apps. So you probably won’t be able to install all apps you already got used to on some other device. There is always the option to sideload apps (by downloading their APK files and installing them manually), but this way you won’t get automatic app updates which is annoying. For full market compatibility you have to install a custom ROM which uses the ID of other tablets.

Amazon pushes out updates to the Kindle Fire pretty often, which would normally be a great thing, but not so much if you are using a rooted device with the stock ROM. Updates are forced and there is no way to deny them, other than using the Kindle Fire only offline which of course makes no sense. The problem is that each update could break your root access so you have to wait for the community to root the new version and provide an walkthrough for it. This cat and mouse play can get very annoying. Chances are that you don’t really need to stick with the stock Kindle Fire ROM anyway as most Amazon services can’t be used outside of the US. This is where custom ROMs come in handy, as using them will prevent the Amazon OTA updates to happen.

Amazon Kindle Fire Custom ROMs

In order to install a custom ROM you will need the FireFireFire bootloader and a custom recovery which you can use to create full backups of your system and flash ROMs. I strongly advise to read through the XDA Devs threads to really understand what you need to do before proceeding.

There are many different custom ROM options out there ranging from Android 2.3 to Android 4.0.3 ICS. When deciding which way to go you should consider a few important aspects. Android 2.3 and all versions before that weren’t meant for tablet usage. On tablets running Android 2.3 every app will look exactly like on a phone, albeit zoomed to fit the screen. Text will still be too small on many cases and since the Kindle Fire doesn’t sport any regular Android 2.3 hardware buttons you can’t use a stock Android 2.3 ROM.

There are some (unofficial) Cyanogen Mod Android 2.3 ROMs available which have been enhanced with soft buttons to cover all basic navigation options like home, back, menu and search. Using this ROMs you’ll have a fully featured device which is quite usable. But there is a reason why Google worked on Android 3.0 Honeycomb and subsequently Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich to optimize the UI for tablets.

From the new position of the notification area to new split views in GMail and many other apps the full potential of the Kindle Fire hardware can only be utilized with an Android 4.0 ROM.

On the XDA Developer message board you can find a thread where the work of a few developers on an Android 4.0 ROM is documented and discussed. Currently the ROM is already pretty stable and the only major topic which needs to be fixed is hardware acceleration which will help making the whole experience much more fluid.

Even though there will be some lags an random reboots every now and then i already use this ROM on my Kindle Fire and never looked back to the old Amazon ROM. The whole UI fits so much better to all tablet use cases, and it’s great to see apps using the tablet display fully. I also love the new homescreen concept as well as widget resizing and folder management features.

Google did a great job in streamlining the user experience and revamping nearly all Google apps. The contacts app is finally looking professional with a much better layout. Gmail as well as the regular email app share the general UI, while they were looking completely different on previous versions.

There are many other new features Google added with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. You can find more details on my Nexus S Android 4.0 review or the upcoming Asus Transformer TF101 review based on the latest Android 4.0 update that has been rolled out very recently.

Verdict

The Amazon Kindle Fire is a great Android tablet with solid specs as well as impressive build quality, and one of the biggest features is the tight integration of Amazon services. Most of them are not available outside the US though, so taking this into account you have only a small fragment of the whole functionality the tablet originally provides out of the box. Getting a Kindle Fire as non-US customer only makes sense if you are willing to learn a few things about rooting and unleashing the full potential of the Kindle Fire with custom ROMs. This is something which will take some time and effort, especially if this is the first time you are rooting a device, and there is always the risk that something goes wrong. Still the 200 $ price tag is very attractive and I’m perfectly happy with the Kindle Fire as my main Android tablet running an alpha Android 4.0 ICS ROM. Even though I have an iPad 2 I find myself coming back to the Kindle Fire more often because of the form factor and the fact that the iPad 2 is too heavy.

So can I recommend the Kindle Fire to anybody searching for a good and cheap tablet? Well, after Amazon entered the market with a very affordable device, other manufacturers also started to work on similar products. Recently Asus announced some very impressive 7 inch tablets with Quad Core CPUs and high end specs having price tags starting from 250 $, so I believe that there will be no need anymore to get a Kindle Fire only to root it and install a custom ROM. You will have other options which ship with Android 4.0 and work right away anywhere in the world. So even though I really love the Kindle Fire I would suggest to wait for 2-3 months and see what will come up next. It won’t take long until many new, and much more powerful, 7 inch tablets are released. And since the only real unique feature of the Kindle Fire doesn’t even work outside of the US, there is no reason why you shouldn’t opt for one of those new 7 inch tablets. If you absolutely must get a device now, and don’t want to wait any longer, the Kindle Fire is currently the best 7 inch tablet around.

When opening Chrome for the first time you will be asked to accept the general usage terms and select a Google account which should be used for the different sync features.

You have two main functions available at the start screen. Either opening a new tab or providing an URL/search term. A new tab will show an overview of your recently opened pages by default, and you can also easily navigate to your bookmarks by touching the star icon at the bottom. But the coolest feature is accessed via the folder icon with two arrows, which lets you access open pages from your desktop Chrome browser. So you can basically surf using Chrome for desktop and sync any tab directly with your mobile phone using the Chrome exchange functionality.

Overall performance is very good, as web pages seem to render a tad faster than on the stock ICS browser. The biggest difference is the smoother scrolling even on heavy pages, where the stock ICS browser would show some serious stutter occasionally.

Text reflow is missing in this beta build. To me this is one of the most important features on mobile browsers as you can zoom into text, which will automatically be adjusted to the screen width by adding line breaks at the edges of the screen. I really hope that Google will add this soon as text reflow was always supported by the stock Android browser and really helped to make browsing the internet much more comfortable.

Instead you have an option to set text size as you can see on the following two screenshots. Page layout will be altered quite a bit if you choose a big text size, therefore I prefer the smaller sizes which may be harder to read but at least keep the page design intact.

By swiping from the left or right edge of the screen you can quickly switch between tabs. The general tabs overview looks a lot like a card stack now which reminds me of webOS. Tabs can be closed by swiping them away and you can move the stack up and down in order to view more content of a specific tab. Everything moves perfectly fluid here, which makes it very easy and comfortable to navigate between open tabs.

Google hasn’t implemented a whole lot of options in this beta release, but all basic settings like cookies, javascript support, pop-up blocker and storing passwords are there.

Chrome beta for Android is a solid first effort, I really like the smooth scrolling and Chrome sync features, but there is still some way to go until it can fully replace the current stock browser. You don’t have textflow, flash support, desktop view and other features that many Android users have become accustomed to in the recent years. Furthermore there are some stability issues, which shouldn’t come as a surprise as this is a beta build. Google already stated that Chrome will become the stock browser in the future so i think we will see some rapid development in the coming weeks with this app, so if Google manages to combine all the features of the current ICS stock browser and Chrome for Android we are in for a truly impressive mobile browsing experience.

Upon receiving the Kindle Fire you’ll notice that it’s just a regular Amazon delivery package, nothing fancy looking like we came to expect from current highend smartphones and tablets. Besides the Kindle tablet there is only a small manual and an AC charger to be found.

The hardware design is very minimalistic but still attractive, i don’t understand why some blogs claim that it’s boring and i prefer the Kindle Fire design compared to fancy stuff that just tries to stand out. There is no front hardware button, so you have a clean look at the 7 inch Gorilla glas IPS display with a 1024 * 600 pixel resolution which results in clear text and images reproduction. Sadly the display is reflecting very strongly which sometimes makes the Kindle Fire a little bit awkward to use when there is a bright light source somewhere around. For outside usage it’s possible to adjust the display to very high brightness settings, which is good but it can’t match the readability of e-ink of course.

I love the soft touch finish of the back because it’s easier and more comfortable to grip than most other tablets like i.e. the iPad 2. Interestingly I even prefer the thickness of the Kindle Fire as the pretty sharp metal edges and the overall weight of the iPad 2 may hurt your hands after a while. This preference will change in the future as tablets will become significantly lighter, but as for now it seems that 7 inch is better suited for me regarding overall handling, weight and size.

The power button, micro USB slot and 3.5 mm headphone jack can be found at the bottom of the device. Some people have complained that you will press the power button unintended sometimes (i.e while resting the device on your lap) because of the position, but this never happened to me.

Loudspeakers have been placed on the top and provide good sound but nothing spectacular. There is no button or memory card slot on the sides of the Kindle Fire. Amazon went for a very simplistic design without any specific highlights. And I really like the understated looks.

Battery lifetime is not among the best tablets out there with approximately 5 hours of heavy usage, but it’s good enough for me. About 6.5 GB of internal storage is available for all your media files and apps after the initial startup, and a dual core T.I. OMAP 4 1GHz CPU is doing the heavy work under the hood.

Amazon did an impressive job with the Kindle Fire hardware. Compared to other devices you would have got 10 months ago for 200$ it’s really incredible to see such a solid product with good hardware specs being sold that cheap. There are some glaring weaknesses like the missing SD card slot, only 6.5 GB of available storage, no front/back camera and no HDMI output, so the Kindle Fire is a pretty closed system but it’s still easily worth 200 dollars overall.

Making money out of hardware sales was actually never the intention, as the Kindle Fire is meant to be primarily a device to access and consume Amazon services. It’s basically the window to the whole Amazon repertoire from streaming services to the marketplace. Now most of this only works in the US currently, so one interesting question is how much sense it makes to get a Kindle Fire outside of the United States. Just taking the hardware specs into account it’s worth the money, but there are some obstacles to be taken before you can use it like a regular Android tablet. Stay tuned for the upcoming Kindle Fire article which will focus on utilizing the device outside of the USA.

Amazon Kindle Fire Hardware Specs

With Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Google was faster to push out the update to Nexus S devices. Nexus One owners have been left in the cold since they will not be getting an official update, but it’s good to see that Google is trying to keep the gap between a new Nexus device and the update for last years Nexus as small as possible.

I installed the update manually on my Nexus S and spent a lot of time trying out every corner of this major update. This is no doubt a very important OS version for Google and Android as it marks yet another big stride towards mass market appeal. With Matias Duarte, a former Palm Lead designer who was responsible for the innovative and intuitive webOS user interface, the focus of Android 4.0 is User Interface and User Experience Furthermore there is no separate Android version for tablets needed anymore, since this Android iteration unifies phone and tablet branches into one source.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Homescreen

After the new (and somewhat blurry) boot animation which shows different colored tiles spinning around, nearly all of your previous settings from Android Gingerbread will be automatically restored. Of course this will only work if you activated the Google backup service which will store information about your installed apps, homescreen setup and internet connection settings like i.e. WiFi passwords.
The homescreen changed quite a bit with Ice Cream Sandwich. You have 4 app shortcuts at the bottom dock and access to the apps tray in the center. The dock is fully customizable as you can change and rearrange the shortcuts freely. Nearly all Google app icons have been redesigned and i really like the new look.

There is a static Google search bar at the top of every homescreen page, which can be deactivated. It won’t free up the space for other widgets/shortcuts though. Deleting the search bar from the homescreen will also result in the search button of the Nexus S not working anymore, so you should really just leave it there. Adding apps and widgets to the homescreen is now very similar to Android Honeycomb for tablets. By pressing the app drawer icon on the dock you can scroll through apps and drag them onto the homescreen.

Additionally you can also access a list of available widgets from the app drawer page and put them on your homescreen too. You will see previews of the widgets on the selection page which is pretty cool, but doesn’t work for all 3rd party apps yet.

Resizing widgets is also possible now, which is a very handy feature. There were many times where i thought ‘this widget is great but i need it in another size’. Thanks to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich you can easily change the widget size by pressing and holding on a widget. You will see a blue line around the widget which you can pull on the edges in order to change the size. At this point all Google widgets can be resized but it doesn’t work automatically for 3rd party widgets, so we have to wait for the developers to update their apps in order to support this feature.

One thing which i never really liked was the folder feature on pre-Ice Cream Sandwich versions, as it was always the same bland folder icon. You could label the folders but there was no way to use different colors or icons to differentiate them. I had to resort to an 3rd party app called AppsOrganizer in order to manage the apps effectively on my homescreen. The new folder feature on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is much better, as you can just drag and drop app icons in order to create a new folder. Each folder will show the first 3 apps which are inside, and you can define labels. It really helps organizing your homescreen, while keeping a clean look. I actually don’t need an 3rd party app anymore.

There are some minor issues though, and one of them is the fact that you have a limit of apps which can be put into a single folder. This doesn’t make sense as there are many categories where you could have more apps than that on your device, so i hope Google will get rid of this limit soon. Another nice to have feature would be the possibility to create subfolders.

I love the new features and the design of the Ice Cream Sandwich homescreen. It’s much better looking and more intuitive compared to the Gingerbread launcher. And the most important thing for me is the fact that it’s absolutely fluid. Finally Google managed to be on par with HTC Sense or LauncherPro when it comes to smooth scrolling across the homescreen pages. Even with some live wallpapers it’s better than the Gingerbread launcher with a static wallpaper. Here goes another 3rd Party app (LauncherPro) which i uninstalled, because there is no need for me anymore to use it. The only thing i miss from LaucherPro is landscape mode, which still isn’t supported by Androids Ice Cream Sandwich homescreen. If you must have landscape support check out Nova launcher, which builds on the ICS homescreen providing additional features. And you don’t even need a rooted device for this.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Notification Drawer

Notifications for Android have always been great and in my opinion the best of all mobile OS. I was a fan of the drawer concept from day one, which has now been redesigned to match the new Tron like UI of Ice Cream Sandwich.

You can finally dismiss single notifications by swiping them horizontally out of the screen. In the past it was only possible to dismiss all notifications at once or leave them on the drawer. Another little tweak is the link to the Android settings, since Ice Cream Sandwich doesn’t have a separate soft button to access general settings anymore. In case of the Nexus S it’s still possible to use the capacitive menu button though.
Sadly Google didn’t enlarge the notification icons on the drawer as they seem to be even smaller than on Gingerbread. This makes it hard to see on first glance if i.e there is a twitter message or an GMail message waiting for me as the icons are just too small.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Lockscreen

Face unlock is a newly introduced way of unlocking your phone utilizing the front cam of a phone to apply face recognition. When Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich was introduced I found it amusing that the feature didn’t work when Matias Duarte wanted to show it off in his keynote. To me the feature is just something you may want to play around with for a few minutes, but not much more. It’s too slow and too unreliable, therefore I can’t imagine anybody using this on a daily basis when a pin code is faster and more secure. And most importantly you won’t find this feature on the Nexus S anyway as it was axed by Google. Face unlock is exclusive to the Galaxy Nexus at this time.

But that’s not all. The lock screen is now showing an icon in the middle of the screen and when you touch it you’ll see a ring appear around the center icon with two options. Dragging the lock icon to the right will unlock the phone while dragging to the left opens the camera app. There is no way to change the camera shortcut to another frequently used app which is a shame.

I like the incoming call handling especially as you will be able to respond with a text message by swiping to the top, and chose one of multiple predefined reply messages. This is very handy if you are in a situation where you can’t take a call and want to let the caller now that you will be checking back later.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Multitasking

One of the biggest letdowns for me is clearly the new ‘multitasking’ aka app switching approach. By touching and holding the home button on the Nexus S you can access a list of your recently used apps.

This looks nice on screenshots but sadly the whole concept is severely crippled by the extremely slow response time. It will take about 2 seconds to open the list after you have pressed the button, which is like an eternity if you want to quickly change between two apps. With Gingerbread you had zero delay but now its practically not useable anymore. Most of the times it will be faster to go back to the home screen and open an app, than accessing it via the recent apps view. And you can’t call this multitasking either as many apps will frequently restart even if you have just used them a few minutes ago. I didn’t experience such problems with Gingerbread, recently opened apps where instantly resumed at the last position I left them. At this point I can’t see any obvious multitasking algorithm that decides whether an app has to stay in RAM or not. And the list is also too big, it’ll show like the last 25 apps that have been opened. This doesn’t make sense at all, because searching for an apps in a long screenshot list takes way too much time and defeats the point of a recent apps page which is meant for QUICK access to a few apps, NOT a list of nearly all apps you have ever opened. This is also the reason why the list loads up so slow, it’s just to darn big. As long as there are up to 5 entries its perfectly fine on the Nexus S, but the lag starts as soon as you have more than about 8 apps in that list.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Contacts

A complete redesigns can be witnessed in the contacts app. Nothing reminds of the old bland list of contacts from past Android iterations.

The color scheme has changed to white background with some blue areas and black text. It definitely looks much better now, but this is not a big achievement considering how bad this app looked up to Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Google took some inspiration from Microsoft as the general look and feel is a lot like the people’s hub on Windows Phone 7. Overall it can’t surpass the WP7 contacts hub though, which is more stylish, faster and also provides Facebook sync that’s missing on Android Ice Cream Sandwich.

But there is Google Plus and Twitter integration, so whenever you check out the details of an contact you will see a large picture of that person now and the latest tweet or google plus update if available. It’s an ok feature but the missing Facebook sync really hurts. About 80% of my contact pictures came from Facebook so now I have a list of over 100 people where only about ten of them have a photo. And I’m not going to take photos manually for all those people.

Even if you would take nice pictures of your friends it wouldn’t help as they will be resized (and made very blurry) during sync to the Google cloud. This is a known issue for a long time, but it seems nobody at Google really cares. But since the new contact details page puts much emphasis on the contact picture, it’s even more important to fix this sooner than later.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Calendar

Besides the new look and UI updates the calendar app finally shows all-day events on the month view as horizontal bars at the top of each day.

Up to now you would only see timebars for events with start and end time, but there was no dedicated indicator for all day items. By using a pinch gesture you can zoom in and out of the week view, which looks nice but i didn’t find any real use for it. Even at the maximum zoom in level you won’t see that much more than before.

The calendar has a very clean and professional look now, the only thing I miss is a widget with a month overview.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Email

A lot of people complain that Android doesn’t have a unified email app for regular and GMail accounts. While this is still true for Android 4.0, the email client was revamped and optimized on many other areas.

It has a new white theme which i really like and there are new icons used for the bottom navigation bar. One of the features i was dearly missing in the past was the ability to search your inbox. With Android 4.0 this is finally possible.

Pinch to zoom is also available within emails so you can easily resize the text of any mail. And since text reflow is also supported this is a very handy feature.

When composing an email it’s very convenient to find an recipient, as the app will automatically search your exchange server contacts and show suggestions while you are writing.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich GMail app

Google aimed for a more unified UI experience, and the GMail app is a good example. Yes it’s still a separate app but it’s very similar to the UI of the regular email client.

You have all those GMail specific features like lables, multiple GMail account support and conversation views.

Strangely there is no pinch to zoom feature available in the GMail app, but it’s still one of the most important and best Google apps for Android. The integration of Google services into Android is one of the strongest USPs for this mobile OS.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Browser

I actually never resorted to installing and using a 3rd party browser since the overall speed and functionality of the default Android browser was always the best solution for me.

Android 4.0 comes with some good additions like the possibility to easily switch to desktop mode of web pages and saving pages locally. Tab switching can be done by touching the icon on the top right corner. The overview of open tabs has been redesigned as well as the look of all other graphical elements.

I’m not that happy with the rendering speed as pages would load faster on gingerbread, and zooming into pages causes the page to become blurry for quite some time until the new zoom level is rendered completely. This was never the case with Android 2.3. At this stage I’d prefer the old Browser because the new one is not only slower but also unstable and force closes a lot. Yes the UI is prettier and there have been some nice feature additions but it’s not enough to make up for the current speed and stability issues.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Beam

Android Beam is a way to transfer data between two devices easily. This is not something new as Palm introduced a very similar feature for webOS some time ago.

I couldn’t try the feature out as there was no second phone around with Android 4.0 but I guess it’s not that spectacular and works as easy way of direct data transfer without the need to resort to something like Bluetooth.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Gallery/Photo Studio/Video Studio

The picture gallery was also redone and is faster and more fluid than before. In overviews you’ll also notice that the thumbnail images are bigger than before.

More interestingly Google bundled some media tools with Android 4.0 to provide video and image editing options. Images can be altered with different filters and effects like spotlight, cropping, red eye reduction and many more. Most functions are basic but still a pretty nice add on.

Videos can also be worked on in order to cut them or create movies out of multiple videos.

There are different audio options available too so you can i.e. add music to an existing video.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Settings

There is also a slew of new settings to be found including encrypting your data, the possibility to check the data consumption overall/ on an app level and developer features like forcing 2D hardware rendering.

Having an data usage overview is primarily interesting when being abroad since local mobile internet flat rates are very common nowadays so I wouldn’t really care how much data I transfer as long as I’m in my home country. Another nice side-effect is that you can now easily spot and deactivate apps which shouldn’t transfer any data.

It’s a pretty cool feature being able to deactivate apps, because on previous Android versions you would have pre-installed apps that automatically started background services and you couldn’t do anything about it. Now it’s at least possible to stop this and preserve some battery power.

I don’t like the fact that you can’t set ring tone and notification tone volumes separately anymore. It was handy to have that option and I don’t see any reason to take it out. Google wants to make Android more accessible but this specific step wasn’t necessary in my opinion.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Keyboard

While the keyboard is still a little bit to small for my taste, it’s the first time I’m not desperately searching for an alternative keyboard on the market.

The ICS keyboard is working quite nicely after some usage time and word correction is much better than before. You can still select multiple keyboard languages and switch between them by holding down the space key.

I had some issues with landscape writing though as it happened a few times that my input wasn’t shown correctly on screen. The sentence I was writing would freeze and the cursor wouldn’t react to my input anymore. This can only be remedied by switching to portrait view.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Battery Consumption

Many Nexus S users have complained about battery consumption after updating to Android 4.0. And it really seems like the duration time is smaller now as I barely get over 20 hours from one full charge.

What’s interesting is the fact that, according to the battery consumption overview, Androids System process is eating up as much battery power as the display. I don’t know what the reason for this is, as it would be beneath 10% in the past Android versions but now amounts to 30%. This looks like a bug to me which should be fixed soon.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Screenshots

While iOS has been providing an screenshot feature for a long time, it was always a little more tricky to make screen captures with Android. You either needed a rooted device with screen capture 3rd party apps, or the Android SDK in order to use a tool which will take screenshots of your Android device via USB connection.

With Ice Cream Sandwich it’s possible to take screenshots by simultaneously pressing and holding the power and volume down button. This will create a screenshot and put it in a dedicated folder.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich The Verdict

Google clearly aimed to make pure Android more appealing to the masses with the Ice Cream Sandwich update. Beside the fact that it also unified tablet and phone branches of the mobile OS, Android just became the 2nd best looking mobile UI right after Windows Phone 7. Finally there is a consistent look across the whole system while in the past most Google apps looked like they have been programmed by totally separate teams without any effort to keep things unified. Even though many Android phone manufacturers will be still adding their own skins, it’s an important step for Google to have a clear design and UI philosophy in order to further strengthen their influence on the mobile space.

Sadly there are some setbacks which hurt the overall experience. System performance is not as good as it was with Android 2.3 on the Nexus S. I was expecting better performance due to the fact that Android 4.0 introduces hardware accelerated graphic rendering. While the homescreen and some transition animations like opening folders are indeed much more fluid, the same can not be said about app startup times which take longer than on Gingerbread. Multitasking is also worse now as its slow and clunky. There are many other small issues and bugs to be found like the wifi icon disappearing or sporadic reboots of the homescreen. A fairly big issue is the fact that the Android System process consumes about 30% battery on average, which is much more than before. I also noticed that Ice Cream Sandwich uses up much more SD partition storage as I have about 1GB less space. This seems to be an issue with the thumbnails folder of your pictures getting too big.

Despite all those negative points I’m still satisfied with Android 4.0, as it’s really fun to use and many apps as well as the homescreen got major updates. I love the Tron like UI concept and i think that most open issues are Nexus S specific which can be easily fixed with a minor update.

Want to see more screenshots? Check out the Android Ice Cream Sandwich gallery.

Competition is always good, and I would love to see webOS finally get the attention it deserves. Making webOS a success is not an easy task. It was a modern and innovative OS when it was released a few years ago, but the market has evolved. Google, Microsoft and Apple worked hard on their operating systems to create incredible mature products. On the other hand webOS was stalled for the past year due to all the turbulences in regards to Palm and later HP. So we have to wait and see how this plays out. I think this was the most fitting decision HP could take considering the whole situation. Now webOS has a chance to survive and become a true (open source) alternative to the existing operating systems.

I flashed the update yesterday manually by downloading the official update zipfile (check this XDA Forum Topic for details) and I’m very impressed. The whole user interface looks significantly better now, Matias Duarte and his team really delivered with this update. The whole UX is much more consistent, unique, stylish and modern.

Nearly all apps have been redesigned, and the home screen is very fluid even with a live wallpaper. I’ll publish an in-depth ICS review in a few days, but you can already check out a lot of Nexus S IceCreamSandwich screenshots at the gallery section.