The reason we still use these old icons is because every single icon requires people to think about and learn what it represents. The only icons that don't requ

The reason we still use these old icons is because every single icon requires people to think about and learn what it represents. The only icons that don't require the user to think are ones they see all the time. If you've never seen an icon before you can only really guess what it means, the shorter the time it takes to guess, the better the icon is. It's for this reason that I don't like icon-only user interfaces, they require too much thinking and guessing from the user. Take a look at these ones that show up when you select text in Android ICS: http://asset3.cbsistatic.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2011/10/18/ICS_copypaste.png http://asset3.cbsistatic.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2011/10/18/ICS_co... What on earth do they mean? I've been using ICS since January and I still don't know what they do except for the cut one. Because there's no way for them to show tooltips on hovering the only way to learn is to press it and try and work out what it just did.