Tom Anderson's thoughts on Ice Cream Sandwich

Other things that I noticed when I updated my Nexus S:<p>* Scrolling and transition animations are a bit smoother. Not quite iPhone smooth but almost. * The tile based rendering for the browser is quite noticeable. While a page is rendering you'll see some tiles rendered at various resolutions or not at all and you can be waiting a while sometimes before the tile you want to read is rendered. * The browser has a save for offline reading option. * The browser allows many more 'open' tabs than it did previously * The locked screen now lets you swipe right to unlock, or left to turn on the camera. This is great for fast access to the camera app. * The locked screen also shows controls for pausing and skipping songs when the music app is running. * Contacts that don't have an international prefix are no longer recognised. I was a bit confused when I started getting messages from unknown numbers before realising I had to update my contacts. * I can no longer lock the screen when playing Angry Birds. When I unlock, the app has died (presumably run out of memory). I guess this is because ICS takes more memory. * The task manager now has thumbnails and is a lot slower to load.<p>So overall I would agree there are some improvements, some changes and some new bugs. But I would recommend upgrading if only for the improved speed - I find it strange that Tom didn't mention that.

My overall experience on my Nexus S:<p>-Horrible, awful battery life. Probably about 12 hours. Hoping they get a fix out soon...<p>-UI is much smoother and more polished than Gingerbread (smoother animations, extra room to put apps on homescreen with the bottom bar)<p>-The new widget features are great (can add a homescreen icon to call/text a specific person, play a playlist, navigate/open a map for a specific location)<p>I love it except for the battery issues.

The tl;dr on this one seems to be: Some things are different. Some things are better. Some things are hard to find. Is there any unique insight in this submission that I'm missing?

CM9 capitalizes on ICS changes and adds some interesting things already. For one, you can enter names "t9-style" into the dialer and it will suggest the closest contact without having to scroll. Very nice if you have hundreds of contacts.<p>Just a thought, if you've got a Nexus, you're 5 minutes away from having CM9.