Ice Cream Sandwich Tour & How to Run the Emulator Yourself

Yesterday, Google announced Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, and, on the same day, released the SDK. That means that you can run ICS for yourself if you run the emulator on your computer. On the bottom of this post you'll find steps (plus a video) on how to get Android 4.0 working on your desktop. But first, we wanted to show you a walkthrough of Ice Cream Sandwich to point out the major new features.


First impressions of Android 4.0? The emulator doesn't give us a good sense of the performance, but what we can tell is that ICS looks much more refined and feels much more consistent when compared to previous versions of Android for phones. We see a ton of UI elements come from Honeycomb, which isn't a bad thing.



To run the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwhich emulator:

1. Download the SDK
2. Extract the Zip to a folder on your desktop
3. Click SDK Manager.exe
4. Put a check in the box for Android 4.0, click Install Packages on bottom right
5. Go back into the Android folder on your desktop, open AVD Manager.exe
6. Click New
7. Give it a name, change the target to Android 4.0
8. Click Create AVD
9. Hit Start, wait five minutes