To be honest, I should’ve realized sooner. The first thing hat Google showed off last night wasn’t resizable widgets or its new browser: it started with the Roboto font — a frickin’ font! It quickly became apparent that Roboto was more than just a font, though: it is a typography-based design aesthetic. Moving through the presentation, Google showed us that Ice Cream Sandwich has a very simple, clean, tile-based interface. There are no rounded corners, no brushed metal textures, visual contrast is very high, and most of all, content is king.
These are the exact same design guidelines that underpin Microsoft’s Metro style paradigm, the tile- and typography-based interface that governs Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8.
Is Ice Cream Sandwich’s similarity to WP7 a coincidence? We’ll probably never know, but ICS’s development definitely begun around the same time as WP7′s release in late 2010. To be honest, it doesn’t even matter — operating systems trade ideas and features all the time. More importantly, this complete interface overhaul is indicative of a much more significant shift: Android is ready and eager to drop its mantle as the nerd and power user OS.
We all know that Android is the geeky option. We all know that it’s built from the ground up to be the antithesis of Apple’s walled, iOS garden. The problem is, neither of these factors make Android phones particularly loveable or usable. Through sheer marketing dollars and low prices, Android is making serious inroads — but has your mom ever told you that she adores her Android phone?
This isn’t to say that Google wants to lessen the functionality or flexibility of Android — Android’s open source community is one of its biggest strengths — but with ICS it is acknowledging that WP7 (and of course iOS) are much easier to use. The Roboto UI is Google’s admittance that — try as they might — function cannot trump form, and that in fact they must be inexorably linked through a standard, easy-to-understand interface if users are to make the most of a device.
American Pie
What we have with Ice Cream Sandwich, then, is Android’s departure from spotty, painted-black malcontent teenagedom, and entrance into the mature, iOS-dominated adult workplace. It’s also impossible to ignore that Android’s newfound maturity very closely mirrors Google+, another Google product that has distinctly eschewed geekiness in favor of mass-market appeal. Along with the shuttering of Labs, its CEO’s promise to put more wood behind fewer arrows, and the resultant end of Google’s Wild West days, it really does feel like Big G is trying to deliver compelling, consumer-targeted products.
At risk, of course, is Google’s thriving developer, power user, and open source community. Ease-of-use, a consistent user experience paradigm, and compatibility are hard to maintain in an open ecosystem. It’ll be interesting to see if Google can retain its geeky panache and also become inherently more loveable and usable, or whether that’s an impossible compromise.
Source is
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/100591-android-4-0-a-coming-of-age-and-homage-to-windows-phone-7
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