MANILA, Philippines — Right now, Nexus S owners should be getting their notices that Android 4.0.2/3 is now available for download. It will take time before the full worldwide roll-out is completed. At the moment, the Galaxy Nexus line is the one guaranteed to be running Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS).

So what does ICS bring us? The Galaxy Nexus, or the god phone that will take on the iPhone 4S, is the first to run ICS. Whilst there are plenty of reviews available on the internet already, I will just give you my personal take on ICS.

Android 4.0 features were presented when Google revealed the Galaxy Nexus in Hong Kong. A brand new UI is the first one you will see. It is always refreshing to see UI improvements in every new OS upgrade. In this case, it is more responsive, and frankly, it is fast! However, I am a bit skeptical on the speed improvement considering that the underlying hardware is also fast -- dual-core processors! I cannot help but compare it to iOS 5.0, ICS still exhibit instances of the UI lagging (vs iOS smooth scrolling).

Scrolling through your installed applications has changed from the vertical rolodex style, to iOS pages style, i.e., you swipe right to left to scroll through the apps and then eventually the widgets. This presentation is better than the old one -- at least you get to see all the widgets and how it looks like before you run it.

There are three navigation buttons on the screen, Back, Home, Task Manager - in the case of the Galaxy Nexus, these are software-based buttons instead of hardware buttons. Task Manager displays a vertical scrolling list of running applications and just swipe to the left to remove the app. There is no dedicated search button but there is a persistent search input field on all the screens!

Menu button is now optional on the Galaxy Nexus. This Menu button is replaced by three vertical dots that appears beside the Task Manager soft button for apps not optimized for ICS and on the upper right corner for ICS-designed apps. I am guessing that phones with the old hardware buttons will have its functionality retained.  Inconsistent? You bet!

The camera app has been revamped by reducing shutter lag to zero. It is amazing to see how fast you can capture (and save) photos on ICS (and Galaxy Nexus). However, focusing is another matter - autofocus is not that fast. Other features such as face detection, real-time effects (ala iChat effects) and green screen like background replacement (again, ala iChat effect) are included, along with 1080p video capture.

And oh, remember those 3 navigation buttons? They’re replaced by dots -- pressing on the dot will display the buttons, but why replace in the first place, right?

One feature that WOWed the audience when ICS was announced is the face recognition-based unlocking, or simply Face Unlock. This is in addition to slide-to-unlock, pattern, pin and password as options to unlock the phone.

Contrary to what Google engineers have said about ICS being smart enough to distinguish a real image versus a photograph, I was able to unlock the phone using a photo taken and saved on my iPhone. A rather useless feature, right?

Smartphones are more effective when they are connected on the internet, either via wifi or mobile data. However, mobile data is not cheap and often comes with a data cap (maximum volume of data transferred).

Ice Cream Sandwich provides a way to monitor data usage on a per app basis. In addition, you can set thresholds, a soft threshold, which when reached, will alert you, and a hard threshold, which can disable data connection all together.