After an untimely delay the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich are officially in the wild — sort of. Join us as we bring you a crash course on the Android phone of the year and the revamped Android Ice Cream Sandwich OS that will revitalize the platform. It’s pretty lengthy but there’s a ton of new stuff to cover. With that said, hop on in…

Galaxy Nexus

While we’d love to get the “love at first sight” feeling with the Galaxy Nexus, the bevy of leaks over the last couple of weeks have all but effectively killed any such feeling. With that said, the specs for the Galaxy Nexus are impressive:

• 1.2 GHz dual-core processor, PowerVR SGX540 GPU, 1 GB of RAM, 4.65″ Super AMOLED HD (1280 x 720) display, WiFi 2.4 GHz/5.0GHz, NFC, 2G/3G/LTE, 16 GB/32 GB of stroage, and Bluetooth 3.0.

**Wireless support is pretty complex. More detailed breakdown: HSPA+ 21 Mbps/HSUPA 5.76 Mbps 850/900/1900/1700/2100 MHz, LTE (depends on country/carrier)

Samsung focused on the display (and why wouldn’t they) specifically highlighting how it is the best display on the market. The size (4.65″), resolution (720p 1280 x 720), and contrast ratio (100,000 : 1) are all many times better than the competition — all of them.

Curiously absent from the festivities: battery life.

Get ready, the Galaxy Nexus will hit U.S., European, and Asian in early November.

Ice Cream Sandwich

“Specifically designed” for the Galaxy Nexus’ gigantor display, ICS sets out to revitalize and marry the two forks (phone and tablet) of Android together into one cohesive product.

Screenshots

Screenshots with Volume down + power for 1/2 a second!

For as many jokes as Android enthusiasts hurl at iOS users for rather rudimentary features being added with each passing update, we find it quite embarrassing to be getting excited over native screenshot ability finally coming to ICS.

New Type Face, Widgets, and UI Tweaks

The first big change in ICS is “Roboto”, a new type face designed from scratch especially for high-res displays. Combined with subtle, “real” (read: no fake textures) colors/backgrounds, ICS is a dramatic departure from the old Android we’ve come to know and love/hate.

The homescreen isn’t too terribly different from iterations of Android in years past. ICS features a default 5-screen layout. There’s room for up to four app icons along the bottom of the display as well as a separate app launcher icon. Underneath that are the new on-screen back/home/app switcher icons. The app switcher is the most unique/new in that it pops up webOS-like live tiles that show currently running apps. Simply flick unwanted apps away to close them.

Moving into the app drawer and you’ll see that things are quite a bit different — for the better. Instead of just apps, you’ll also see a new “widgets” option, bringing everything together in one place.

Notifications

Notifications (like iOS) get a revamp in ICS. You can now customize what kinds of notifications make their way to the drop-down as well as use the same “flick” action to dismiss individual notifications.

In-line Spell Checking, Web Browsing, Gmail Enhancements and Calendar Enhancements

Texting is now easier than ever, too! Inline spell-checking and more robust, system-wide copy/paste come along for the ride as does tweaked speech-to-text feature that at least during the onscreen demo, worked well.

Web browsing in ICS is now more desktop-like than ever thanks to a new “tab” button within the browser and support for up to 16 concurrent tabs open at any one time, incognito mode, and the ability to save full-screen web pages (formatting and all) for offline viewing.

Google’s bread & butter Gmail email service gains 2-line previews, left/right swiping between emails and a contextual action bar that changes depending your needs. The UI for conversational views is perhaps the most dramatically redesigned aspect (see above) taking on a more image-rich appearance. On top of that, Google is now bringing “one of the most requested features to mobile Gmail”: offline search that will go back as far as 30 days. (Excited?)

Similar to the revamped Gmail app, the new Calendar app acquires the same left/right swiping gestures for navigating between calendars/events, though users can also pinch-to-zoom the same events too.

While not shown off directly, all other Google apps not specifically mentioned (including Google Music) will feature the newly implemented gesture support.

Data Usage/Tracker App

One particular neat feature/app debuting in ICS is a new Data Usage tracking “app” within the settings app. Like one would expect, the new Data Usage app tracks data rather exceptionally, providing a detailed chart that can be zoomed in on so that users can specifically configure apps’ data usage including when/how they connect to the network — great for people on low-cap data plans.

Photo Sharing And Built-in Social Sharing With “People” App

Sharing photos is insanely easy now with a 3-click process. After taking a picture simply tap on a picture share with any social service as long as said app/service ties into the new Google photo-sharing API. But before you share that new photo you might want to touch it up a bit. In ICS you can now crop, remove redeye, adjust angle, and touch-up photos. And while Instagram’s Android ventures are slow coming, it appears Google is moving onward on their own — there are Instagram-like filters built into the native camera app. If all that wasn’t enough, Google has also integrated panoramic capabilities into the native camera as well. (Sucks to be an Android photo/camera developer right about now…)

Pictures are great but what if you want video? ICS delivers. For starters you’ve got 1080p on board. The video demo shown off in Hong Kong are allegedly unedited outside of the stock video app on the Galaxy Nexus. And yes, the videos looked nice. Really nice.

Combining the photo/video and sharing features of ICS, Google is throwing a third feature into the fray with the new “People” app. Think of this is a completely modern take on the classic contact/address book. People are organized by “closeness” and displayed with large thumbnails of their faces pulled from social services, automatically. Tapping on a person gives you a quick pop-up that allows one-click access to the users’ phone/messaging/social accounts.

Dialer

The lowly dialer gets a little TLC with new full-screen screenshots of the person on the other end and quick one-tap access to the callers’ other means of contact — similar to the People app, includes messaging/social accounts too. Visual Voicemails are integrated right into the recent call screen area and include the ability to speed up/slow down voicemail playback in real-time.

Face Unlock Facial Recognition

All of the features above are building on previous technology. But Google’s new “Face Unlock” is a completely new feature that uses the users’ face to unlock the device — a feature that’s pretty difficult to “steal”. Unfortunately for Google/Samsung, the feature didn’t exactly work seamlessly during the onstage demo. Nonetheless, we’re excited to see how this feature works in the real-world, and if 3rd party developers will be able to tap into any type of Face Unlock API.

Android Beam

Android Beam — another new feature exclusive to ICS that is also one of the few features to make use of NFC. Essentially it’s a quick, wireless way to share information between two devices with NFC. Simply touch two phones together and BAM! In the on-stage demos in Hong Kong a web page on one Galaxy Nexus was “Beamed” to a second. Another example had a Google Maps location transferred to another via NFC. Very cool. Google promises that even straight out of the box users will be able to beam a ton of content. (Hopefully 3rd party apps can tap into this too!) The coolest beam functionality that was shown off, however, included a Galaxy Nexus playing a game sending the second phone directly to the same game in the Android Market — fancy QR code-type stuff.

Availability

ICS will launch with the Galaxy Nexus in early November but developers can get the party started right now with the official Ice Cream Sandwich SDK.

Android 4.0 ICS SDK: Download

Conclusion

Ice Cream Sandwich is more than a simple UI refresh. While the UI did in fact receive some new paint throughout the system, the number of new features and tweaks in how information is shared across not only the OS and local device, but other devices as well is very interesting.

Images property of: TheVerge