Cloud Connected

Cloud-connected experience

Android has always been cloud-connected, letting you browse the web and sync photos, apps, games, email, and contacts — wherever you are and across all of your devices. Android 4.0 adds new browsing and email capabilities to let you take even more with them and keep communication organized.

The Browser tabs menu (left) lets you quickly switch browser tabs. The options menu (right) gives you new ways to manage your browsing experience.

Benchmark comparisons of Android Browser.

 

Powerful web browsing

The Android Browser offers an experience that’s as rich and convenient as a desktop browser. It lets you instantly sync and manage Google Chrome bookmarks from all of your accounts, jump to your favorite content faster, and even save it for reading later in case there's no network available.
To get the most out of web content, you can now request full desktop versions of web sites, rather than their mobile versions. You can set your preference for web sites separately for each browser tab. For longer content, you can save a copy for offline reading. To find and open saved pages, you can browse a visual list that’s included with browser bookmarks and history. For better readability and accessibility, you can increase the browser’s zoom levels and override the system default text sizes.
Across all types of content, the Android Browser offers dramatically improved page rendering performance through updated versions of the WebKit core and the V8 Crankshaft compilation engine for JavaScript. In benchmarks run on a Nexus S device, the Android 4.0 browser showed an improvement of nearly 220% over the Android 2.3 browser in the V8 Benchmark Suite and more than 35% in the SunSpider 9.1 JavaScript Benchmark. When run on a Galaxy Nexus device, the Android 4.0 browser showed improvement of nearly 550% in the V8 benchmark and nearly 70% in the SunSpider benchmark.

Improved email

In Android 4.0, email is easier to send, read, and manage. For composing email, improved auto-completion of recipients helps with finding and adding frequent contacts more quickly. For easier input of frequent text, you can now create quick responses and store them in the app, then enter them from a convenient menu when composing. When replying to a message, you can now toggle the message to Reply All and Forward without changing screens.
For easier browsing across accounts and labels, the app adds an integrated menu of accounts and recent labels. To help you locate and organize IMAP and Exchange email, the Email app now supports nested mail subfolders, each with synchronization rules. You can also search across folders on the server, for faster results.
For enterprises, the Email app supports EAS v14. It supports EAS certificate authentication, provides ABQ strings for device type and mode, and allows automatic sync to be disabled while roaming. Administrators can also limit attachment size or disable attachments.
For keeping track of incoming email more easily, a resizable Email widget lets you flick through recent email right from the home screen, then jump into the Email app to compose or reply