Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich

The availability of the 4.0 release has not been as wide as a lot of users might have hoped for. Upgrades for existing handsets have been slow in coming. And for many handsets, including your editor's trusty Nexus One, there will never be an official 4.0 system. Even worse, the CyanogenMod developers have also decided that they will not be working on porting the upcoming 4.0-based CM9 release to the Nexus One. Their reasoning is understandable—in short, the Nexus One lacks the memory to run this release in a pleasing way—but it is still somewhat sad. Once upon a time, the Linux community prided itself on continuing to support older hardware long after its manufacturers had forgotten about it. As Linux moves into the consumer electronics world, the ability and the desire to support last year's devices are both falling by the wayside.

Interestingly, it is not just the core system that leaves older devices behind. Users of older Android releases who search for this week's hot application often get a surprising result: nothing. If an application does not run under a given Android version, the "Google Play" program simply will not show it at all. (Perhaps more disconcertingly, viewing an application's page with a desktop browser yields the message that one's handset—not currently in use—is not supported). The end result is that users of last year's hardware can find themselves in a situation where parts of the application landscape simply seem to disappear over time—updates stop happening, and new applications may never become available.

The inability to run an application for LWN's payroll service, combined with the availability of an unlocked version of the Galaxy Nexus from Google and the simple desire for a new toy drove the acquisition of a 4.0-capable device. There is one thing about the Galaxy Nexus which immediately stands out to a Nexus One (or Nokia N9—your editor's other device) user: its size. The Galaxy Nexus could almost be considered to be an extra-small tablet; it is large enough to be an uncomfortable fit in a pants pocket.

That size brings some advantages, of course, starting with the larger screen with its 1280x720 resolution. The phone features five-band 3G connectivity, a dual-core processor, a front-facing camera, and even a built-in barometer. The extra processing power and memory are immediately evident when using the handset; it is far more responsive than any Android handset your editor has used previously. Given all that, it may just prove possible to get used to hauling a larger handset around.

Google's version of the Galaxy Nexus is fully unlocked, meaning it is a simple matter of a single "fastboot" command to unlock the bootloader, which is the key to installing a different operating system on the device. There is one little surprise worth knowing about: on this phone, unlocking the bootloader will wipe the device. Anybody who wants to do the kinds of things enabled by an unlocked bootloader is presumably prepared to cope with an amnesiac handset, but this behavior is still a good thing to know about.

The ICS experience

To users of previous Android's versions, the Ice Cream Sandwich release can be a little jarring at first. Some things just aren't where one expects them to be anymore. Certain ingrained behaviors—holding down the home key to get a list of running applications, for example—don't work in the same way anymore (in this case, the application list has been moved to its own dedicated key). The application directory now scrolls sideways instead of upward. One can no longer place widgets or contact icons on the background by holding a finger there; one must, instead, notice the little tab in the application directory and use that. The search and menu buttons are long gone. In the menu case, the button has been replaced by an icon that may appear at the bottom of an applications screen, except when it appears at the top instead; playing "find the menu" can be one of the more awkward parts of the ICS experience. That notwithstanding, the interface mostly works well once one gets used to the new ways of doing things.

One simultaneously good and bad feature of Android phones is the way they upload so much information to the Google mothership. The good side becomes immediately evident when one moves into a new handset; an awful lot of things Just Work like they did on the previous one. Contacts and calendar events are there, applications magically install themselves, and so on. Your editor was a little surprised to observe that Android handsets now pass wireless network passwords up to Google as well; the new handset associated itself with the local network without even asking. Searching through the menus turns up a mention of WiFi passwords in the "backup" option; they are stored with the list of installed applications and other bits of miscellaneous information. There is no apparent way to turn off the backing-up of these passwords, which might well be regarded as sensitive information, without turning off the backup feature entirely.

One other surprise that has clearly hit a number of Galaxy Nexus owners is that the handset cannot function as a USB mass storage device when plugged into a computer. Instead, it wants to talk to the media transport protocol (MTP), which gives it better control over what is shared with the host. Alas, MTP is not particularly well supported in Linux; there is a FUSE-based mtpfs module, but it failed to function properly on your editor's system. The best approach seems to be to use an application that has libmtp support built into it; nautilus, for example, is able to move files to and from the phone with relatively little trouble.

There is, as it turns out, a whole series of applications out there aimed at making it easier to move files back and forth. Most of them set up some sort of web server on the device that can then be accessed from elsewhere on the net; some have fairly slick JavaScript-based browser interfaces. These applications also must be given full access to the entire device, and one must trust that they will let only the intended user into the device. One of them demanded the ability to access location data, which was a bit disconcerting: it certainly does not need that information to carry out its intended task. Linux-based users may be most at home with an application like SSHDroid, which runs an SSH server accessible in the usual ways.

There are some other nice 4.0 features worth a quick note. It includes a reasonably advanced mechanism for controlling and limiting wireless data use that can, among other things, monitor and clamp the usage of specific applications. Internet telephony with SIP is a native Android feature now, but, in a move clearly intended to mollify carriers, the handset will not do SIP calls unless a WiFi network is available. Android can now use dm-crypt to encrypt all the storage on the device; an encrypted phone requires a password at power-on or it will not be able to function. Those curious about the details of how whole-phone encryption works on Android can find some information on this page.

One other thing one notices quickly with the 4.0 release is the presence of a number of user interface features that, previously, were only available with CyanogenMod. The ability to tweak the color of the notification LED, more home screens, the configurable "favorite applications" bar at the bottom of the home screen, and the ability to go straight to an application from the lock screen—though the latter is limited to the camera on official Android—are examples. CyanogenMod may not have any sort of special path into official Android, but it seems clear that Google's developers are paying attention to what CyanogenMod is doing. That is not how a typical open source system might work, but it's far better than nothing.

On the other hand, other CyanogenMod features are still very much missing. Your editor misses the configurable "power bar" widget, for example. CyanogenMod allows the application directory to be displayed more densely, even on the Nexus One's smaller screen. The CyanogenMod camera application is superior to what Android offers, though, it must be admitted, the new panorama mode in the 4.0 camera application is kind of fun. And, of course, Android just does not offer the sort of configurability provided by CyanogenMod.

The good news is that, of course, there is a version of CyanogenMod 9 in the works for the Galaxy Nexus. Experimenting with the CM9 nightly builds has not yet begun in the LWN laboratories; it seemed worthwhile to get a good sense for stock Android 4.0 first. But the truth of the matter is that one does not truly appreciate a shiny new gadget until one has attempted to brick it. So stay tuned for a look at CM9 on this device sometime in the near future.

In the meantime, it is clear that the development of the Android platform continues at a fast pace. It has become visibly slicker and more capable over a relatively short period of time. For better or for worse, Android represents a highly successful combination of fully free software, corporate-controlled open source, and fully proprietary code. The result may not be quite the 100% free device that we would like, but it has led to a series of nicely shiny toys with a lot of hackability, which is not an entirely bad result.