The Parsons School of Design User Experience 2012 have given their award this year to Google’s latest Android OS, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The operating system has come a long way over the years. When users first got their hands on it they considered it to be bland and found the user experience to be boring which led to many customizing their handset with vendor’s 3rd party software.
Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich polished to perfection
However as the platform began to mature slowly, it also began to improve and with each successive version of the software there came many new and welcome changes to the design. However it wasn’t actually until the release of Ice Cream Sandwich Android 4.0 that the OS stopped being the ugly duckling and turned into a beautiful swan. The user interface is now beautiful and offers a cohesive experience and while some users do not like the TRON motif, the majority of people have spoken out and the OS has been awarded the best platform experience. The news of this was announced on the Google+ page of Matias Duarte along with a post full of what can only be described as congratulatory responses which included the likes of:
ICS really is nice, it’s basically invisible. Exactly what a UI should be unlike a certain fruit-logo company with textures and animations at every corner. Cheers +Matias Duarte and Congrats +Matias Duarte and team! You guys really deserve it. The UX between 2.3 and 4.0 is like night and day.
What do you think of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Should phone makers finally stop sticking their custom UIs over the Android operating system? (e.g. TouchWiz, Sense, Blur)
