Summary
Joshua Topolsky (emp. mine):
This question sparked deep user studies at Google on mobile phone use, what Matias described as “Serious baseline ethnographic research which hadn’t happened before.” He tells me that the company spent a great deal of time and effort watching how and why regular people used their smartphones. Not just Android phones, but all smartphones. The company even had employees “shadow” users, visiting them at their homes and workplaces to watch how they interacted with their devices. Matias wouldn’t share numbers, but intimated that the study was a significant undertaking.
This, in my mind, is the battle that Google is constantly facing. In a rigid engineering-biased culture, how do you build products or platforms for people who aren’t engineers?
In the same article Matias Duarte says, “We want to create wonder. We wanted to simplify people’s lives.” Duarte is amazing at what he does, and I wish him the best of luck in turning that ship.
Roboto
I actually like it. Has character.
Screen Resolution
The new expected resolution for Android 4 phones is 1280x720. The best I can figure this requires a 4+ inch display. Is this really the case? Will everyone really start walking around with mini-tablets in their hands?
The Google Apps
The updates look great. Google’s apps have always been good on Android. So good, that in my experience they were just about all I used. I found few things that came even slightly close to them in quality and ease of use.
No more hardware buttons?
Seems that those hardware buttons are going away, which is a Good Thing. The sooner Android can ditch those buttons the better.
Face Unlock
Didn’t work in the demo, which gives me no confidence it will work in practice. How maddening if you can’t get your phone to unlock. What do you do, stare at it harder? Maybe I’m wrong and it’ll work everywhere but the demo.
Sharing
Looks like intra-app sharing has gotten even better. Android blows iOS away on this front; I really wish this behavior was available on my iPhone.
User Experience
Again, from the Topolsky interview:
Matias also told me that a new style guide was being prepped for developers with lots of off-the-rack pieces that would make it easier for third-parties to create the same kind of streamlined, beautiful applications I saw in Ice Cream Sandwich.
If you’re and Android user, this should be wonderful news. Android apps are an inconsistent mess of UI across the board. Some level of convention would be amazing for Android users.
Availability
I haven’t heard yet when you can buy a non-Google Android 4 phone yet. Given history though, it could be nearly a year, by which point you could get an iPhone 5, or a Metro phone.
If the Galaxy Nexus really is the Big Hit Android 4 phone though, maybe the Android experience really will improve afterall.