Asus Eeepad Transformer IceCream Sandwich Review

By now I guess all of you have upgraded to the latest Android love, Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS).
How do you guys feel about the OTA update? Satisified or totally hate it?
So, below is what I think of the latest OS.

First of all, the moment the tablet boots up after the installation you will be presented with almost the same interface as Honeycomb making you wondering if the tablet was upgraded at all. :P
You will notice the battery bar and the time is in blue and the App button on the top right is different. That is the only difference. But, once you press the Home, Back or the Recent key button, there will be a blue glow that was not there before in Honeycomb.Looks nice.

I clicked on the Home button and it popped up with all the application I had installed prior to the upgrade. There is no more "My Apps" tab and it was replaced by the Widgets tab.Scrolling through the pages was pretty smooth, in fact feels smoother that it was on Honeycomb.

There is a new application called App Locker and I fell in love with that the moment I saw it because it has the ability to password protect your applications. The sole reason I loved it was to prevent my son to open all games that is not intended for his age (He's almost 3 by the way) such as GTA III, 9MM among others. Thank you ASUS for including this in the upgrade.

The keyboard was pretty smooth and the auto-correction is simply awesome.

The next noticeable difference is the statusbar. It is glowing blue colour with the shortcuts for Auto-Rotation, Wifi, Bluetooth, Volume, Auto-Sync and GPS, not forgetting the Brightness. You can access the settings from here too.

Once you click on the Settings, notice that it is categorized to Wireless and Networks, Device, Personal and System. Pretty neat. 

One of the important features incorporated in ICS in my humble opinion is the ability to create folders on the desktop. It was not available on previous versions of Android. Pretty useful and a very attractive folder indeed. Once you touch the folder, it will popup and show all shortcuts inside.

Playing videos is quite smooth. I had no issues with that but I did see a few people complained about it on the XDA forum. Camera interface is improved with the ability to take panorama shots and there is video effects. Unfortunately, the camera hardware sucks so you would not see much improvement over here. The good news is I doubt anyone in this world is using the camera, seriously.

The stock browser was fast and now have the possibilities to do Offline Reading and also Request to view a Desktop site in case you are redirected to a mobile version of the web.
Besides the stock browser, I simply love the Chrome browser (not officially available in all countries but you can get it from here or here). It pretty smooth and quite cool. Try it yourself to know it.

Google Chrome beta

Android Stock Browser

Update - 29th Feb 2012 (Yes, it's a Leap Year)

Yup, I totally forgot about the redesigned Gallery. The new interface is way better than the previous version as you can see in the below screenshot.It is now in a tile interface which I feel is less cluttered than the Honeycomb version. You have option to edit the photos with some new effects thrown in and it does makes the photo looks better. Checkout the special effects options in the screenshot below.

Notice that the album pictures are now larger and easy to view

The pictures inside the album is also in tiles format

Once a picture is selected, there is option to edit the photos. Also, see that you can see small thumbnails of all other photos below the main image.

 

All the effects available in the Edit mode.

So far, this is what I think about the latest Android upgrade. Overall, I am satisfied with it and have no issues whatsoever.
How about you? What do you guys think about ICS? Let the world know what you think by commenting below.