Being summertime, my Italian co-workers have gotten me hooked onto an Italian culinary delight, affogato. It is a scoop of vanilla ice cream with a hot shot of espresso, and the combination is sweet and invigorating - sugar and caffeine, what could be better :)

What's this have to do with Thinking Out Cloud? Last week, my sleek & sometimes super-fast 4G Motorola Droid RAZR Maxx smartphone was updated to Android 4.0, aka Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS). I wanted to share my experience with the upgrade and my use of a personal cloud.

First, the phone upgrade to ICS was impressive. This wasn't my first Android upgrade but it was my first for a major new release, from Android 2.x to 4.0. The upgrade download took ~10 minutes plus another 10 minutes to install and for the phone to restart. The entire process was painless and smooth. Once my phone came back to life, everything from my prior version of Android continued to work. Nice!

it did take a little time to get used to the new ICS interface. But after a day, I figured it out. My wife has the same phone and I upgraded its OS as well. It took her a couple of more days, she is not a techie, and she did mumble occasionally about how everything was different and difficult to do some basics, like answer a call. But a few days later she also had it figured out and now she loves it as much as, well, affogato.

One minor thing that took some time to figure out was how to access the web browser bookmarks with a minimum of taps. I read that if you turn on quick navigation via the browser's Google Labs setting, you can just slide your finger down the left or right edge of the browser and get a pop-up menu to instantly access the browser controls. Once that was turned on, it was sweet, like, yep, affogato.

Another thing I love about ICS is its voice recognition. It is astonishingly accurate and well integrated. I don't own an iPhone and can't speak to Siri (no pun intended). The ICS voice recognition is not directly comparable to Siri (that would be Google Now, a separate thing), but just the ability to do voice search on practically anything and have it provide highly accurate results is super cool. I asked for weather forecasts, traffic conditions, sports scores, business addresses, driving directions, in mixed sound environments, and got 100% accuracy. It reduces the need for typing, which is particularly important in a car. I've shown this to co-workers, friends and family and they've been impressed.

One suggestion for ICS is to have a guided tour for its new features. I read various articles about the new features of ICS but nothing I saw walks the user through discovering and trying them. Maybe there is something and I missed it. I think this would go a long way towards indoctrinating people like my wife to the joys of ICS and making the new interface less intimidating for non-techies.

Now to the cloud. This past weekend I attended a wedding in a remote area of California where the internet connection ranged from spotty to none. This was in the Malibu hills, and yes, there are still many places on Earth where the internet is unavailable. This made a lot of the smart functions on my smartphone dumb, including the browser, voice calling, email, basically, anything requiring connectivity.

I used my phone to take pictures and videos of the wedding and as soon as my phone came back onto the grid later that night, they were automatically transferred to my personal cloud. I was then able to share selected pictures and videos with others in the wedding party as well as post videos on YouTube and photos on Facebook.

So how does this relate to ICS and the cloud?

• Although there was no internet at the wedding, I could still use the native functions on my phone i.e. my cloud service worked with and supported offline use, in a natural way
• As soon as the internet became available, it automatically detected new content on my phone and placed it in my personal cloud for safekeeping, without doing anything. I didn't need to remember what was already transferred to my cloud or not, it just worked
• It allowed me to selectively share just the items I wanted, in the manner I wanted e.g. via email links to some people, with others via a social network or online video site, rather than forcing all of my content into a particular cloud where certain items might be inappropriate for some people
• When I got home and turned on my other devices, like our home computer and my work laptop, within minutes, all of the wedding pictures and videos were there, again, without doing anything. Magic!