With Android Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) about to be released, one likely feature has been contentious for Android fans. Google looks set to bring the button-free design first used on Honeycomb tablets to the phone side of things. The reflexive worry about wasting screen real estate is a red herring, and actually ignores the many reasons this interface paradigm makes sense. To put it simply, button-free design is going to be amazing on Android phones.

By moving the iconic Android system buttons into the operating system’s UI, the platform will attain greater flexibility and usability. This will be exemplified most obviously in the re-purposed menu system. In ICS, as in Honeycomb, there will not be a single menu button, but users will instead have the contextual Action Bar at the top of the interface in apps.

Android has always been plagued by the use of scrolling lists of menu options, and sub-menus. The Action Bar is adaptive, and does a good job of surfacing the options that actually pertain to the current scenario; on phones, the Action Bar will reduce the number of taps necessary to trigger important actions. This is the kind of flexibility an on-screen button system can offer.

The use of on-screen buttons will also make the experience more consistent overall. It has often been pointed out that the order and quality of buttons vary from one phone to the next. By implementing on-screen buttons, Google will give OEMs the option of standardizing, and reducing engineering time.

Capacitive buttons, like those used on most phones, tend to be finicky, and can malfunction if a phone has grounding issues. When the touchscreen handles all these functions, the phone can be designed more easily, and with a smaller bezel for a sleeker look. In a similar vein, removing the need for hardware buttons means that manufacturers can take all that extra space and use it for bigger, better screens. Not only will this offer users better full-screen content, but it will keep the devices themselves from getting bigger when the screens do.

Perhaps the best part of all this is that you won’t be forced to buy a phone with no buttons. Android is about hardware choice, and it is unlikely that Google would mandate that OEMs remove buttons, so there will still be ICS phones that have hardware buttons under the screen. The new software will find its way to older devices in time, and they have buttons, so it is certain that ICS will support that arrangement.

Google may provide some opportunities for user customization of the functionality in these buttons, but independent developers will surely take it from there. Expect custom ROMs and root apps to give users huge control over the way these virtual buttons work. Since ICS is expected to be open source once more, the innovation from the community is going to be brilliant.

Ice Cream Sandwich’s on-screen buttons are not to be feared, but embraced for the boon to usability they will be. On-screen buttons will improve general usability by being more flexible in daily use, and Action Bar menus will save time as well. With these features at their disposal, OEMs are free to make a new generation of devices with slim designs and great screens.

Android 4.0 has now been announced: Check out our complete explainer