The newest Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is no ordinary OS update.  Instead, it's a revamp of the platform that brings a whole host of new features, apart from unifying the smartphone and tablet versions of the software.

To cover the entirety of the changes will involve drowning in the details -- there's too many to reasonably run down.  For the purposes of this review, we'll focus on the larger-scale changes.

Transformed Visuals

Ice Cream Sandwich brings a whole new look and feel to the platform -- one that's more elegant and sophisticated.  Almost every screen has been redesigned, combining some elements from Honeycomb with a reworked aesthetic.  From the home screen to the menu lists to the folder appearance to the new notifications pull-down, it's just an overall more attractive, less cutesy interface.

Camera

Panorama is now a built-in mode in Android and it works really smoothly (at least, on the Galaxy Nexus).  The joint photo and video gallery is also redesigned to cram in more thumbnails in each screen.    Plus, Google finally decided to invest in really good photo editing tools, which are built right into the gallery.

Contacts

The Contacts app has been overhauled for the better.  The layout, for instance, makes photos more prominent, with more customizations available for each person (you can send all of a contact's calls to voice mail, for instance).  Scrolling through your contacts also feels less cluttered.  You can also start a text, email or call by simply tapping on a photo from any native communications app.

Email

We love the more spacious reading space, as well as the way contacts' email addresses and photos pop up.   When composing emails, you can drag and drop highlighted items easily across the form, bypassing the whole cut-and-paste hoop.  We like the new word correction feature, which feels more like a proper word processor than previous  versions.  Oh yeah, the new onscreen keyboard is very generous.

Facial Unlocking

The new security option allows you to unlock the phone by holding it up to your face for a few seconds.  If it recognizes you, then you get access to the phone.  If it fails, you can type in the PIN or trace a pattern on the screen, both of which are more secure than the facial thing (a high-res life-size photo could unlock it, as some bloggers have shown).

Other Notables

There are many more new features on Ice Cream Sandwich, including Android Beam  (which transfers data from one phone to another over NFC), a heavily-improved browser, visual voice mail, and a whole host of sleek little things.

Cubicle dwellers know the drill.  Get a PDF in your email, print it, sign it, scan it, convert it and send it back.  Yep, that much time off your life just to sign a memo.  SignMyPad for Android can spare you from the sorrow.

There are two versions of the app: Basic ($3.99) and Pro ($19.99).  This review is for the Basic edition, which strips out features like GPS tagging, but should cover most normal people's needs well enough.

With SignMyPad, you skip all the previous steps and just sign your PDF documents right on your phone.  Simple open it from your email or file list, choose Signature as the element to add, and doodle your best longhand using your chubby finger.  Granted, signing a valid signature (one that can be verified as yours) will probably take some practice, but it's worth the trouble, especially if you work in one of those huge multinationals where everyone's always trying to cover their own ass (hence, the never-ending cycle of signatures required).  Personally, it took me about five minutes of signing my name over and over to get the hang of things.

Oh yeah, pinch to zoom works inside the app, which is most welcome.  You can also add other elements, aside from signatures, including checkboxes, dates, radio buttons and long texts, allowing you to fill out forms right on your touchscreen device.  When you add an element, you can resize it automatically using a slider that appears on top of the screen.

SignMyPad Basic fills a definite gap in the market.  While the slider can probably use more flexibility in sizing, everything about the app works great. Highly recommended.

[Android Market]

You've read the comic, you've watched the movie, might as well play the damn thing on your phone, too, right?  We're, of course, talking about Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty, which is currently out on the Android Market.

As with many movie tie-ins, this isn't bound to be a classic of any sorts -- just a movie tie-in platformer meant to cash in on Cap's current popularity.  That doesn't mean it's bad, though.  In fact, it's plenty playable, with great-looking characters, detailed backgrounds and decent cinematics to boot.

Sentinel of Liberty features three stages, each one with eight levels to complete and plenty of items to collect.    As for the latter, you will want to pay attention, since the collectables lead to unlockable items, such as alternate costumes and other extras.

We actually enjoyed the game's control system, which has you swiping one direction to have Cap auto-running towards that side.  While moving, Cap can slide, jump, attack, with a few variations thrown in along the way (e.g. he can throw his shield, jump walls and perform combos).   Taps and swipes tend to be ignored on occasion for some reason, though, making for a frustrating experience when it happens (think jumping onto a platform -- only Cap doesn't jump but keeps running).

On the downside, the game -- like many movie tie-ins -- feels like a rush job.  The story isn't marginally compelling, navigation is screwy and you will experience crashes on older handsets (by older, we mean from last year).  Still, Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty is a pretty decent platformer and should be a good pickup for the 99-cent price  (not a keeper, but it should be good enough to have around for a short while).

[AndroidMarket]

Much has been said about Android's less-than-desirable stock music player.  While serviceable, the software is cumbersome to manage for large music collection and there's little in the way of extra features to play with.  Fortunately, there's a whole slew of apps ready to fill the role of a fuller-featured alternative.  Here are five of our favorite free music players from the Android Market:

Cubed. Sporting one of the prettiest interfaces we've seen on a music player, it throws up a three-dimensional cube that shows the album art on the face.  You can navigate your collection either by artist or album,  flicking vertically to spin the cube and horizontally to move through your artists in an alphabetical order.  The actual player's features are pretty standard, although they do offer a listing for upcoming shows for currently playing artists, which some folks should find useful.

Winamp. Yep, that same Winamp you probably had on your PC several years ago is available on Android.  It's got all the usual bells and whistles, along with some nifty additions, such as wireless syncing with your Winamp desktop library and built-in Shoutcast radio.

Songbird. I love Songbird on the PC, despite its many shortcomings.  While the desktop version tries to do too much for its own good, the Android version scales down hard, offering a very streamlined player that's notably clean and simple.  Extras include Facebook integration and a Flickr photo stream for the currently playing artists.

Meridian. While a Pro version of the app is available, the free one is advanced enough on its own that I've never bothered upgrading.   An all-around, feature-filled media app, it expands Android's file support, offers plenty of gesture-based actions (e.g. forwarding ten seconds through a song), bring up lyrics and delivers an overall higher usability experience than many similar titles on the Market.

MixZing. If you like iTunes' Genius, then you'll love MixZing, whose recommendation engine sits at the heart of its feature set.  As soon as you start playing a song, it will begin searching for 20 songs to recommend to your queue, which you can add or remove.  In case you'd like it to recommend songs out of your library, it has that, too, with track previews built into the interface for quick decision-making.  Other features include an equalizer, extra information about the artist playing and Last.fm integration.

If you're using an Android device with a Tegra 2 chip providing muscle, you'll naturally want to put all that processing power to good use by running apps that make full use of it.  And you'll be able to find them easily with the NVIDIA Tegra Zone, a free Android app that curates and highlights applications that are optimized to perform at a high level with your dual-core chipset.

After MWC 2011, it's well established that NVIDIA's system on a chip will act as the main guts for a whole host of tablets and smartphones due this year.  With the Android Market barely being a functional resource for finding good apps, this handpicked  compendium could prove to be an indispensable tool for the mass of users bound to embrace those new power-packed products.

The NVIDIA Tegra Zone is, essentially, a magazine app with content focused solely on Tegra-optimized titles (you know, those with refined geometric detail, heavy computation loads and higher-res textures).  Games are, naturally, the primary focus,  with extra content comprised of professionally-written reviews, screenshots and videos (trailers, gameplay samples and featurettes).  All sales and delivery, however, will still go through the Android Market.

At launch, titles highlighted will include Dungeon Defenders: First Wave Deluxe HD (the first Android game built on the Unreal Engine 3), Samurai II: Vengeance, Galaxy on Fire 2 THD and several other games that have been specifically tooled to take advantage of Tegra 2's power.  The app is now available for download from the Android Market.

[via Engadget]

If you frequently use you Android smartphone for shooting videos, you will occasionally want to grab stills from it for whatever purpose.  While you can probably do that after transferring the clip to a PC, there's now an app you can use to cut still frames right from your handset: Framegrabber.

The process is simple.  You launch the app and load a video from the SD card, which it will break up frame by frame in a circular 3D-style arrangement.  From there, you can simply scroll through the frames, pick a still you like and save it as an image.  You can then send that still as an email attachment or upload it to a social network.

Framegrabber's UI is quite attractive, with very intuitive navigation and straightforward operation.  The split-screen design (with the scrolling frames at the bottom and the current frame at the top) very helpful, saving me from having to tap on a frame to see it in detail.  There isn't much in the way of settings, though, beyond picking how videos will be indexed (either by frame or by time) and a couple other superficial items.

Do I love Framegrabber's function?  Definitely.  I'd probably love it more if I was really big into shooting videos on my phone and grabbing stills from it to send out to friends, though -- something I don't think I really have a need for.  As it is, the $4.27 price sounds a bit too steep for something I'll probably use very sparingly.  Your own needs may vary, though, so it could well be worth the price for you.

[FrameGrabber]

With bandwidth caps still a major part of the broadband experience on smartphones, torrents haven't made the leap to mobile platforms in a big way yet.  Still, you get the occasional app like uTorrent Remote, which lets you manage the torrent downloads currently running on your PC.

Naturally, you can check on the status of all uploads and downloads happening on the computer.  More than that, though, you can use the app to actively control your torrents, with options for adding, starting, pausing and removing file downloads right from your handset.    It can work with torrents from RSS feeds, too, allowing you to stay on top of your favorite podcasts.

uTorrent Remote only works with uTorrent 3.0, which is currently an alpha build.  As such, it's still quite buggy -- if you can live with that, though, being able to do the management from a handheld is extremely convenient.

You need to choose a username and a password, which the app will use for communicating with the desktop software.  It doesn't stop at managing torrents, either -- you can send finished ones to your Android handheld for playback.  Do note that copying files will depend heavily on file size and signal strength, so you'll need to wait a while to play your files.  Oh yeah, there's no file conversion on board, either, so pick and choose what you stream wisely.

The uTorrent Remote's UI is simple but intuitive, making it a very convenient way to manage your torrents away from a computer. It's available now from the Android Market.

[uTorrent Remote]

At its core, a phone is a device for calling and texting.  With processing power comparable to some computers from just a few years ago, however, smartphones have expanded our options for getting and staying in touch with everyone we know.

If you got a new Android phone for Christmas, you can maximize its potential for communication by grabbing these five essential apps:

Facebook for Android. If you're on Facebook, you probably can't spend enough time on it.  With an interface that's easy on the eyes and intuitive navigation, this app makes keeping up with your Facebook pals a breeze even on Android phones with smaller displays.  My favorite part is the photo reel at the bottom of the icon dashboard, which lets you swipe through thumbnails of your contacts' recently uploaded images.

TweetDeck. The official Twitter app is good.  The lack of support for multiple accounts, however, is a definite dealbreaker. Tweetdeck for Android, on the other hand, brings that, along with the full roster of features in its desktop version.  Plus, it supports Buzz, Facebook and Foursquare accounts, all while being completely free.

Meebo. Granted, Meebo isn't the best IM app on Android.  However, it is the best one  offered for free.  With support for all the major IM clients and a good helping of features, you really can't do better without forking out some cash.

Google Voice. With this app, you can call, send an SMS, receive voice mail and perform a whole host of phone communications over data lines.  That means, no extra charge on your monthly billing (provided you don't go over your data cap, of course).

Fring. If you plan to do VoIP video calls (over Skype or SIP) on your Android handset, you want Fring.  On top of that, it also doubles as a decent all-in-one IM app and can be downloaded for free.

Got a new Android phone for Christmas?  Here are six utility apps you'll want to get on it ASAP.

1. LauncherPro.  If you don't like your default homescreen, this ultra-flexible replacement app can do better.  From the number of panels you want to the style of the app drawer, this has all the customizations you wish the default Android homescreen came with.
2. Astro File Manager.  Eventually, you'll want to get a folder view of your phone's contents.  This app gives you that, along with a task killer, attachment sending and files backup.
3. Widgetsoid.  Want to configure your home screen widgets?  Look no further than this app, which can do a whole host of things, from replacing the icons to managing various aspects of the experience.
4. Quick Uninstaller.  There are many ways to get rid of crap apps that you originally thought were cool.  This app is probably the most convenient available.  One tap to choose, another tap to remove and your business is done.
5. AppBrain App Market.  The Android Market is functional, but terrible to navigate.  If you switched sides from the iPhone, you would be very disappointed.  Fortunately, there's AppBrain, a third-party app that offers a better overall experience, including search, rankings and categories.
6. Apps to SDCard. If you like hoarding apps, your phone's built-in memory will eventually tap out.  This app lets you move some of them from the phone's flash storage to your SD card.  Do note that Android 2.2 already has the same capability, so if your smartphone's running that, you can probably give this one a pass.

Multi-tasking has been available to Android users for the longest time.  That doesn't mean it has evolved into a perfect feature, though.  In fact, I have never been satisfied with the way you're supposed to switch between apps -- it's clunky.  With Multi-Tasking Pro, it's come one step closer to an ideal experience.

The app is certainly a much-needed improvement over the platform's default task switcher.  For one, there's a good amount of customizations, allowing  you to personalize the task-switching experience to suit the way you work.  You can choose the display type (grid or list), select apps to show (open, recent or services) and even exclude apps individually from the task switcher (in case an app is supposed to permanently run in the background, for instance).

Multi-Tasking Pro can be launched by either a long press of the Search key or a quick press of the Home button.  This will bring up an overlay window showing the apps. From there, you simply tap on the icon you want to put in the foreground, each one of which comes with an X graphic in the corner which you can use to force it shut.

The interface is nice, too, with a cute rotating animation that shows when a new app takes over the screen.  Additionally, you can check the status of each app right on the task switcher -- very useful when there are things running in the phone you just aren't sure about (like background services or system apps).

Overall, Multi-Tasking Pro is a valuable replacement to Android's default task-switching system and is a good purchase for $2.99.

[AppBrain Link]