The much anticipated Android 4.0.3 “Ice Cream Sandwich” (ICS) ROM for Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S II (SGS2) phone has just been officially released. This comes after over 3 months of “leaked” ROMs that has allowed many eager SGS2 users, like myself, to experience what ICS has to offer, and to preview what Samsung has been prepping for this final release.
This is version “LPQ”, built on 8 March 2012, and became public five days later on 13 March 2012. The leaked ROMs had a few problems, which was not unexpected since they were “beta” after all. So users, like myself, who lived on the cutting-edge and had tried the leaked ROMs, hoped that the final release would be really extraordinary.
Alas, it’s precisely because we have tried the leaked ROMs, and already experienced all the new features brought by ICS and Samsung’s customizations, that made the final ICS release a little of an anti-climax. The ROM works. It looks just like the leaked versions. But of course it should look like the leaked ROMs eh, they were after all beta and release candidates of the final release.
This is not a vanilla ICS ROM. You’ll expect Samsung to make some customizations. Some of these are necessary. For example, stock ICS uses on-screen buttons, doing away with hardware device buttons. But what if the hardware, like in the case of the SGS2, already has real buttons? It will be really silly to have screen real-estate used up to duplicate functionality already provided in the real hardware. So in this case, it makes complete sense for the SGS2’s ICS to be modified to do away with those unnecessary on-screen buttons.
Overall, the user interface in ICS has undergone some refinements. No drastic changes, just little things here and there that, all put together, brings up the user experience up a notch. You don’t necessarily want big changes. Big changes can be disruptive, disorientating, and may take time for people to adapt and accept. But everyone can welcome little improvements to brighten up their experience.
There are new ICS versions of Google applications like Maps and Gmail. The menus in the new Maps are rendered with an overlay effect so that you can see more of the map underneath them. The buttons for zoom control is gone, now you just directly use multitouch pinch zoom/un-zoom. (I actually preferred using the buttons as they gave more consistent control.)
The Gmail interface has also undergone some changes. One important improvement is that the message list display shows, in addition to the subject and sender, one line of message text. Now, you can very quickly determine if a message is worth your time to open and read, right there from the message list. There are also more direct controls to perform various actions.
There are, decidedly, still some things broken with this LPQ version. For example, some (most?) widgets cannot be resized. I did find that the Weather widget could be resized, but pretty much most other things I’ve tried, and in particular, the Android Agenda Widget, could not be resized. What a bummer, since because of precisely the ICS widget resizability feature, Android Agenda Widget has stopped including every combination of widget size, but instead just offered a few standard sizes from which you can resize.
Anyway, there is a simple solution to the widget resizing problem. Change the home screen launcher. I have been rather loyal to Samsung’s stock applications so far. Until a friend pointed out ADW Launcher EX (which I bought during the 10 cents sale previously) allowed widgets to be resized. My past experience with ADW Launcher wasn’t all that great, so I hadn’t returned to it since (even when I paid 10 cents for it). But it seems ADW Launcher is now so much more polished than before.
But I didn’t use ADW Launcher. I got to know about Apex Launcher, and hey, it seems like it was even more beautiful than ADW Launcher. It also allowed widgets to be resized. Clearly the problem with widget resizing was an issue with Samsung’s tock TouchWiz launcher. I’m on Apex Launcher now.
Battery performance on the LPQ ROM hasn’t been great. In fact, at the moment, it still seems like it’s draining battery faster than ever. I hope to get some sort of battery calibration done this weekend, and then I’ll be able to tell with more certainty how the battery is performing.
The battery aside, I think the LPQ ROM, while nothing earth-shattering when you had seen the leaked ICS ROMs, is still a great ICS ROM overall. If not anything else, Samsung has shown is commitment to keep its flagship SGS2 supported through the latest Android update.
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