Android 4.0 aka Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest and most advanced version of Android OS introduces a refined, beautiful and unified UI for phones and tablets. Besides the smart new design, ICS offers a variety of innovative features for users and developers. Some of the newly added key features in ICS include – easy multitasking, rich notifications, customizable home screens, resizable widgets, native screenshot capture support, improved browser, improved text input and spell-checking, redesigned Gallery with photo editor, and a lot more. See the Android 4.0 Platform Highlights.

Apparently, Galaxy Nexus is the first device pre-loaded with Android 4.0 to offer a pure Google experience. ICS is going to be officially available for several other high-end Android smartphones but that wouldn’t happen anytime soon. The Android 4.0 platform is available as a downloadable component on the Android SDK, allowing developers to create and test their applications on Android 4.0 with the Android emulator. Interested users can also test drive and experience the awesome interface and features of ICS, simply by installing the official Android 4.0 emulator on their computer.

Steps to Install Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Emulator on Windows –

1. Download the Android SDK. (choose the .zip file for Windows)

2. Extract the contents of Zip file to a folder on your desktop.

3. Run ‘SDK Manager.exe’ from the folder. Tick mark the package ‘Android 4.0 (API 14)’ and click on ‘Install Packages’.

Wait until all the package components are downloaded. (Requires Internet and may take quite long depending on your connection speed.) A new window will appear, just choose Accept and click Install.

4. Upon installation of all the packages, a window will pop-up asking to restart ADB. Just click Yes.

5. Now run ‘AVD Manager.exe’ from the directory mentioned in step 2. Click on ‘New’ to create a new AVD. Give AVD a name, select target as Android 4.0, select a desired skin and Create AVD. (We chose HVGA, device RAM size can be specified too.)

Note: The emulator consumes high CPU resources, so set higher parameters only if you’ve a powerful system.

6. Select your AVD from the AVD Manager and click on Start. Then Launch it.

That’s it. Android 4.0 emulator will now boot up and present the ICS home screen.

The emulator can be controlled using both mouse and keyboard. It might act a bit sluggish as it’s a memory intensive program. ICS emulator has a set of virtual buttons and keyboard to operate it like a phone. Explore the various functions, settings and menus of ICS via this emulator to quickly taste most of the cool stuff!

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Opera team has introduced an amazing program ‘Opera Mobile emulator’ which Web developers can use to see how their website performs and looks on Opera Mobile 10 browser right from their desktop, without needing any mobile devices or smartphones. Try it now!

Opera Mobile emulator is the desktop version of Opera’s smart phone browser which allows developers to Test and debug on Opera Mobile using a Mac or PC. It renders pages as close as they would appear on a real phone. It can be paired with Opera Dragonfly for an effective testing environment before taking it to the physical phone.

It also includes Opera Widgets Mobile Emulator which developers can use to load and test widgets in a similar manner as they would do on a Symbian or Windows Mobile.

Why it’s useful -

All developers don’t have the luxury of owning a multitude of different connected devices, with a range of screen sizes needed to effectively test their sites and applications for cross-device compatibility. This is why we have made available a range of tools to make this testing easier from the desktop.

The program is Free and very easy to use, just download, install and run it!

• Opera Mobile for Windows
• Opera Mobile for Mac
• Opera Mobile for Linux (deb)

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Alcohol is now offering their highly known product (Alcohol 52%) as a Free edition. This is the latest version which is offered for download.

Alcohol 52%, is a powerful Windows CD and DVD burning software that makes it easy to create backups of DVDs and CDs. In addition, the program lets you store your most used CDs as images on your computer.

Main Features:

• It has the ability to emulate and record CDs and DVDs together into one amazingly easy to use software program.
• Alcohol 52% is ideally suited for Laptop use (no need to take your expensive discs along to a meeting where they can become misplaced).
• Ability to create 6 virtual drives.
• Play a CD or DVD from the virtual CD-ROM with 200X reading speed.
• Emulation software allows users to play CDs DVDs without the need for the disc.
• Includes Protection Database Search Toolbar

Remember you can not run Alcohol 52% if you have Alcohol 120% installed on the same drive.

Download Alcohol 52% Free Edition  (Offer page)

This version of Alcohol 52% is for private, non-commercial, single home computer use only.The license is provided personally to you and for that reason it does not allow you to make any duplicate (copy) to be sold, borrowed, assigned, leased or transferred.

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