I woke up this morning to find that my Xoom had the brand new Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android waiting. I've been using my Xoom (with Honeycomb) since last March, and this has been the most exciting update for the Xoom to date.
Starting with the basics, the new font (Roboto) is very crisp, and easy to read. One of the minor gripes, and an early reason why I almost avoided the Xoom, was it;s ugly font for the clock in the system bar along the bottom. At the end of the day, the font became a non-issue, and i haven't looked back since. The system navigation (swiping back and forth between screens) and general responsiveness has been notably improved. The system widgets for Gmail and Calendar are very easy on the eyes now (not that they were bad before), and the contacts app (now called People) is much better.
If I can reduce this little review down, it would simply say "Polished" like never before. There isn't as major a change from the user experience from Honeycomb (3.0) to ICS (4.0), but if your phone has ICS, and you used Gingerbread (2.3) then it's almost a whole new world.
Aside from spit and shine polish that ICS brings to the table, and the snappier UI response, the built in keyboard has greatly improved it's speed/response when it comes to web browsing. Sites like news.com and canv.as no longer lag in scrolling, however the built in browser still chokes on the animate gifs on canv.as, whereas Firefox Mobile handles it no problem.
The Camera software has been improved, with the new automatic panorama options enabled, allowing for some beautiful landscape shots. Strangely though, the much discussed feature of the Facial Recognition Unlock security feature is missing. I'm hoping that it's just being reworked/tweaked, and will come at a later time.
Generally speaking, I tend to burn out on my fascination with technical gadgets like my android phones and tablet, but I can tell that my Xoom has truly been rejuvenated with this update. There's a lot more that I could type up, and describe (like the improved inline spell checking just like MS Word in most applications) but there are better reviewers and writers out there and all that I can do is express my satisfaction with this update.
[note] This was originally posted on Google+ on Thursday Jan 19
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