Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Top 5 Android O Features!”.
Hey what is up guys, mkbhd here, a b c d, e, f g h, i j k, l m n o we’re like halfway through the alphabet. Already google is moving pretty fast, so either way. Android o developer preview is out. Now it’s been out for a little bit, it’s been announced, we have a logo, we don’t have a name, it’s always a dessert theme. I would guess it’s oreo, but i’m always wrong.
So your guess is as good as mine. Either way it appears to be a pretty incremental update. So it’s not this huge massive overhaul. You would have heard about it already if it was, but there are some new stuff and we’ll go over that, but for the most part, it’s a mostly behind the scenes. Update stuff, you might not even notice if you weren’t familiar with the previous version of android, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some cool stuff to cover. So this is your top five new features of android o.
So number five. Is your lock screen customization? So this? Actually lies in the system ui tuner, which is a new feature added with android marshmallow and it’s kind of hidden like developer options, but once you unhide it, it holds some pretty cool stuff that i hope sticks around or even graduates from the system. Ui tuner into more visible main features so with lock, screen shortcut customization, you know how, on your lock screen, you have the swipe up from the left to open your voice, control or swipe up from the right to get to your camera. This actually lets you change. Those shortcuts to whatever app you want.
So if you have some favorite apps that you launch a lot more often, you can go through literally all the apps on your phone and pick your favorites and that will swipe up to unlock into whatever app you choose. So that can be pretty useful. If you text a lot or tweet a lot or snapchat a lot whatever you pick, those shortcuts will be on the bottom and i think that’s pretty neat now number four is what i would call contextually aware: text selection dialogue, it’s a terrible name, but it’s way Cooler than it actually sounds, so you know how, whenever you select any text just plain text on android, you get a couple options to copy or cut or paste or select all well now the selector is actually context aware. So if you highlight an address, a google maps link will actually appear and you can hop right into google maps just from that selection. So if you have someone texting you a phone number, you highlight that phone number. It gives you a link to call that number immediately. So that’s the kind of convenient stuff. It’S recognizing i’m hoping it’ll, also work when i highlight a link it’ll be able to open that up into my web browser, but usually that’s just a hyperlink anyway, but either way pretty cool stuff. I’M happy to see now number three is a little bit of customization with the navigation buttons down at the bottom.
We’Ve seen this built into a couple third-party skins, but this is also in system ui tuner. So you can now choose between a compact which puts them all in the middle or a left, leaning or right, leaning set of buttons. So people with big phones and small hands will find that easier to reach from one side with one-handed use, and then you can also add an extra button or two on the bottom that stay permanently there.
So a clipboard button is an example, not sure if it’s for copy and paste functions or just a permanent place to view your clipboard, because it’s not fully functional here yet, but the president is set and it’s pretty cool. I’D like to be able to add my own button there, whatever i want now number two is a refreshed notifications panel. This is a subtle one. It’S definitely a visual one and you’ll notice it if you’ve seen previous versions of android the icons up top and the quick settings are now a little bit cleaner. There’S some new icons up there too, the thin lines underneath some toggles, but also check out that slick, new animation for revealing from the icons as you swipe notifications down, that is pretty hot, and then you have a couple new notification behaviors. It seems like these get a little bit more complex every time, and that would be true, but it’s not too crazy. This time, first of all, the battery percentage is revealed with one swipe instead of two. I really like that, because i like seeing my actual percentage instead of just trying to guess, based on how full the bar is and then you can do a half swipe over on a notification to snooze notifications from specific apps for some time. So this might low key, be one of the most underrated features.
So let’s say you just dropped a fired tweet. Your phone is blowing up with all these twitter notifications. Instead of muting your whole phone, you can snooze just your twitter notifications for say, 15 minutes and that will still allow you to not miss any calls or any emails or any other notifications. Then, when that’s done it’ll come back, i think that’s pretty awesome.
My only complaint here is, i wish the half swipe was a little bit easier. It’S still way too easy to accidentally. Do the full swipe and then you just dismiss the notification completely, and you can’t get that back. I did that a lot, but i still really like the ability to snooze notifications from just a single app that is really cool to see now the last one number one is a whole new settings app and this one is maybe the only actual big redesign in The entire top five is the new settings.
App is a lot cleaner, it’s visually overhauled, i think the old settings apps and even on other phones. Besides, the pixel was starting to get a bit overwhelming with the sidebar and the tons of settings. But now it’s a lot simpler, looking and it’s a much shorter list and the side out menu is gone as well. Overall, it’s a shorter top level list, but you can still dive more into the actual settings or just use the search bar just to get to stuff that you know.
Is there it’s black and white now as well, and also some of the pages like the storage information, readout, look a lot cleaner, plus they give you that big important visual up top. That is pretty helpful same thing with like the battery settings. For example, it still breaks down by your most used apps, but you still get that big, clean graphic up top for the percentage and estimated time left and power management tools, but yeah. That’S it there.
You have it. Those are the top five, at least from what we know right now. Best new features in android o, don’t know the name yet like i said, but we’ll be finding that out pretty soon and it’s a developer preview. So this is still evolving.
There will be new versions of it and there will probably be new features added in the next couple months before it becomes official and rolls out to phones like you, don’t get these huge overhaul updates every couple months or it will be a little bit crazy and Obviously, still most phones don’t have the latest version of android already yet so this will be rolling out slowly, but from what we’ve seen? What is your favorite new feature? Let me know thank you for watching talk to you guys, the next one peace .