I bought my Asus Transformer TF101 on August 14th. It was running Android 3.2 aka Honeycomb. I had used Android before, so using the Honeycomb version of Android wasn’t that much different to Gingerbread. I had waited for Asus to release Ice Cream Sandwich for their TF101 model. Transformer Prime got it earlier, but the owners of TF101 had to wait for Google approval process to end. Well, enough of that now, because this post was supposed to be about my user experience of ICS on TF101.
My first thought about ICS on a first boot was “Blimey this looks fantastic”. I looked around a bit in the menus and saw that the menus look a little different. Things had changed places, icons had been changed. It felt faster than it did before the update, which was a really good thing. The next thing I noticed was that the X’s on a single notifications had disappeared and there was a single X where you could clear all notifications. This seemed like a bad thing, but I tend to forgot that you can swipe the notification to clear it off. So no complaints there either, just my own forgetfulness. ICS has also added the smaller setting buttons in the notification bar. You can set WiFi off or on, disable bluetooth from there and so on. Honeycomb didn’t have this, so it is a nice addition to almost perfect tablet OS. The other new thing I like in this OS is the Data Usage. It shows how much data different applications use. I like to see how much data I use on different things. I didn’t miss this feature in Honeycomb, because I couldn’t even think that something like this could exist by default in tablet operating system.