Be patient, owners of the Motorola RAZR and RAZR Maxx. You'll get your ice cream someday – Ice Cream Sandwich, that is, otherwise known as Android 4.0. But if you can't wait until the end of June to get your hands on the latest update to Google's OS, and you haven't already installed a custom ROM that gives you the "unofficial" benefits of Ice Cream Sandwich, Motorola has a treat in store for you.
The company just released a series of videos today that shows off exactly what Ice Cream Sandwich is going to look like on its two RAZR phones. Spoiler: It's going to be pretty.
First off, an upgraded lock screen allows you to swipe and unlock your way to one of four different elements on the smartphone: the camera, text messaging, the phone itself (dialing-style), or the conventional home screen. It's much more elegant than the previous, ugly lock screen Motorola opted to use, and its usefulness goes one step beyond standard shortcuts for those rocking out on their mobile devices. You can also access your music controls from your lock screen – a great way to pause, play, or skip tracks without having to waste time first unlocking your smartphone.
Motorola's thrown a new battery icon onto the notification bar of the smartphones' home screens which now uses 13 different individual graphics to show you the percent of phone time you have left. The window indicator sitting at the bottom of the phones' home screens now only appears momentarily, instead of all the time, and the "favorites tray" on the bottom of the screen now uses five icons instead of four – phone, people, messages, camera, and an "apps button" that pulls up a list of everything that's installed on your device.
But that's not all.
Two new features join the phones' camera app: One gives users the ability to shoot time-lapse photography at intervals anywhere from one second to ten seconds between shots, and the other allows those shooting videos to take quick, simultaneous snapshots of what they're filming.
And, finally, Motorola's waved the white flag on its own customized social networking app. According to the website Mobile & Apps, it seems as if users are being encouraged to go out and grab the various apps for whatever social networks they happen to enjoy: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, et cetera.
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