Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Top 5 Android 4.4 Kitkat Features!”.
Hey what is up guys, mkbhd here and after looking at all of today’s announcements after compiling and analyzing it all and looking through every single thing here it is, and here we go, this is the best of the best. These are the top five features of android 4.4 kitkat. Technically this is only a 0.1 update from android 4.3, but for those of you who thought this was going to be a super minor update that didn’t really matter. Think again, there’s a lot of awesome stuff going on here. So i’ll have a whole bunch of links right below that like button for all of the important things that’ll cover everything i’m talking about, but without any further ado check this out number five is the dialer and i think a lot of us forget that, ultimately, the Smartphones that we used today were originally designed to place and receive phone calls, so the dialer is improved in android 4.4 and it’s improved in both the functionality and the design. The design is different because it is uh.
First of all, it organizes your most frequently contacted people up at the top by default. So that’s nice and convenient and also brings a new flat, clean, simple design that we’ll see more in android but we’ll get to that in a second. But the functionality now is also upgraded. It acts as a search box in the most convenient way possible. So right now there’s a search box up at the top of the contacts app. If you want to search a friend whose name is eric or something you can type in eric and it’ll find eric’s contact, but if you want to search for a local business or a local place, that’s near you like a starbucks. You can type in coffee in the search, app and it’ll find the nearest places that serve coffee near you from google maps, it’ll, give you their phone numbers and, of course, their names that is very convenient. Number four is nfc mimicking, it’s called host card emulation and basically, what this does is. It allows any device running kitkat whether it has an nfc chip or not to emulate nfc based transactions. So you can read and write nfc whether you have the chip or not. This will hopefully be beneficial to bringing the ability to use nfc stuff like mobile payments, to as many devices as possible. Now a lot of the new devices that get android 4.4 kitkat will probably have an nfc chip anyway, but when this gets to older devices that don’t have nfc chips, they’ll be able to use all sorts of awesome features. I did a video specifically called the top five best things you can do with nfc all the awesome features, so you can check out that annotation or click the link in the description where i have that video.
So if you want to check out all the awesome stuff that nfc and nfc based transactions can do for you, that’s where it is number three is the design update and it’s? This is all about the looks basically here. Uh kitkat has changed a lot of the elements that we’ve gotten used to in android since, like android 4.0, with the very hollow look but they’re a lot flatter they’re a lot simpler and i really like a lot of them. Most notable is the new transparency of the buttons along the bottom and the notification bar up top and also the gray new time and battery icon and all the indicators up top are also now that flat gray look, there’s also a slightly adjusted system-wide font in android. All the different stock apps are updated with android, and they all have this new clean design to them, and even the touch responsiveness on the bottom buttons is is much neater, it’s much more subtle. So, overall, it has a very nice cleaned up. Look that i like to, but it definitely keeps the beautiful it keeps the beautiful hollow stuff it brings full screen album art to your lock screen when listening to music.
It brings also these new full screen apps that can take advantage of hiding your system icon buttons and your notifications up top and basically immerses you in this full immersion mode, is what they call it, and actually now brand new to stock android. You can actually tap the screen swipe down from the top to find those notifications in a full screen app. You couldn’t do this on android before, but now when you’re gaming. If your phone buzzes, you have to close the app to check to see what that notification was now, you can swipe down in immersion mode and find it so overall, there is a flatter cleaner, look to all the apps inside of kitkat and the operating system itself And i like the new look – and i think it’s very subtle, but it’s also a definite improvement from android 4.3 to 4.4 number two is streamlined performance, and this is arguably the most important update to all of android 4.4 kitkat. In fact, when you take a look at the blog post and the official page announcing the new update, it says at the top of the blog post, kitkat brings all of android’s most innovative, most beautiful and most useful features to more devices everywhere now, they’re not actually Doing this like giving you the newest version of android, but they are facilitating this by seriously lowering the system requirements of android 4.4 kitkat, and this is a big deal because usually going from an older version of an os to a newer one. The system requirements naturally get bumped up as technology moves forward, but the newest version of android will run smoother, faster and more efficient and more responsively on devices with as little as half a gigabyte of ram.
The os itself is much more memory efficient and they’ve streamlined major components of android, so the whole thing, including multitasking, will be much faster and they’ve introduced new apis to help your favorite developers make great apps that will run smooth and more responsive on way more devices, Especially those with lower specs, this kind of makes specs even less important than they were before. There’S also even this new built-in setting called process stats. So you know how, before you could see exactly how much storage each app was using on your android device. So you could tell, when you filled up your internal storage they’re, going to have this app called process stats, which will look like the same thing for your ram. So you can see exactly how much ram your individual running applications are using and it’ll. Give you a better contextual idea, a better visual of well, whether or not you need more ram if you bought a device that can’t quite handle all your multitasking or, if you’re doing just fine with one or two gigabytes now in terms of bringing this to more Devices uh it’s launching right now on the nexus 5, which is shipping now, so you can go, get one um and i think they really missed out on a huge opportunity here to update their nexus s and their galaxy nexus.
Even to this latest version. To really show how serious they are about supporting older phones and lower end specs, but they’re not as far as we know, right now, they’re updating the nexus 4 nexus 7 and nexus 10.. The google play editions are going to be right afterwards and soon right after that, we’ll see carriers and manufacturers start to announce when their updates are going to roll out to their devices, and that brings us to number one, which is google search and google. Now, smarter everywhere, first of all, in your home screen on the launcher, you’ll be able to swipe all the way to the left and get to google now, which is very conveniently accessed similar to the way that global search was inside ios 6.
And, of course, you can also still swipe up from the bottom soft buttons to also get to google now and on the snapdragon 800 nexus 5 you’re going to be able to just start saying: ok, google and it’ll start opening the google search and searching so it’ll. Be constantly listening to you when you’re on your home screen – and this is as far as we know, only the nexus 5 because of that snapdragon 800 enabling it so it won’t hit battery life. But that’s pretty cool that it’s there and, like i said, the new contacts app is also basically a google search app. The dialer will let you search through google maps and local business listings and there are a ton, more improvements, new cards and new optimizations into google. Now i called google now personally one of the best products of 2012 and it seems like google realizes how important and how unique and how good this product is and they’re putting a lot of effort and research into making this a better product for 2013 and that’s Easily why it gets number one pretty much.
No other company has a product as powerful as this that ties into other google services, and that has so much potential, especially so. The more google develops this, the more i’m going to talk about how great it is, because i’ve done separate videos about how good google now is and it’s awesome, and i encourage you to check it out if you haven’t already now. Of course, this wouldn’t be complete without some honorable mentions, so i got to give a shout out to the hangouts app which is being updated alongside kitkat, because it is getting sms and mms support.
So in the newest version of android, it’s actually the default messaging app. So it’ll be in your dock. You’Re gon na be seeing a lot more of hangouts now, and i actually like that, because the default messaging app before really isn’t all that great. It’S pretty bare. So i’m proud of how far hangouts has come in such a short period of time and now it’ll be the default hangouts and sms and mms app. I got to give another mention to the new sms api.
It sounds boring, but once you realize how good it is it’s great usually before when you want to set a new third-party sms, app messaging app, you have to disable the notifications in one and then enable the notifications, in the other, to fully switch over. It’S going to be one click now with the new api in kitkat. So if you want to set some other third-party sms app, as your default it’ll literally be sending those messages directly into that third-party app, you don’t have to worry about. Switching on and off notifications. It’Ll go directly into your app of choice. So, if you don’t like hangouts, you can use some other messaging app and it’ll.
Be your default and it’ll only take one click and there’s even more little. Things like there’s going to be the emojis now everywhere, where you’ll use that google keyboard and you’ll be able to print pretty much anything on any printer with google cloud print enabled there’s a new downloads app. The old one was really quite bare, so this one’s much more organized and kitkat will also now support pedometers ir, blasters and all sorts of other low-powered sensors. So there’s lots of little tweaks behind the scenes here and even littler.
Things like when you get a phone call from a number that google sees in maps is a local business it’ll, do an image, search and find a relevant image to that business and show that as the caller id along with the name of the business. So, even if you don’t have that business in your contacts, you will get a photo and a name in your caller id, because google knows that that’s a business. It seems by reading the literature that this newest version of android 4.4 is all about enabling older devices and lower end lower powered devices so for older devices, it’s going to be all about those carriers and those manufacturers bringing out those updates. Even this moto x here, which is basically on almost stock android, is still running android 4.2, so it would have to leapfrog 4.3 to get the 4.4 update and that’s the case with a lot of other older devices. I think google, if they want this to happen, they really have to push this and make this the number one thing they talk about to those carriers and manufacturers. If their relationship is square, hopefully older devices almost as old as the galaxy nexus will be getting kitkat.
Overall, it seems like this is a very solid upgrade to android. This might not be an overhaul if you will uh, but this new android is definitely smarter, more efficient and very much more google. So there you go be sure to share this video out for people who are wondering about the new android 4.4 update or wondering what the operating system has anything to do with. This is a video to share with them, so that share button is below.
Thank you for watching, and i will talk to you guys in the next article peace. You .