Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Android 5.0 Lollipop Feature Review!”.
Pretty hey what is up guys mkbhd here and i’ve been using the lpx 13d build of android 5.0 lollipop on my nexus 5 for the past couple of days and surprise, i really like it a couple weeks ago i showcased an earlier build of android 5.0. The developer preview back on it was just known as android l, but now with lollipop. There are a lot of new features, and this build is as close as we have now to final. So this is a rundown of a lot of the new awesome features that i think people are gon na like so right off the bat two words you’re going to hear a lot when it comes to android 5.0 are material design and, while that’s an entire redesign Of all of android, you can probably sum it up best in one word, which would be animations. Basically, everything you touch brings something onto the screen or moves it off.
So you know exactly where things are coming from and where they’re going and that’s the whole point. So the straight up, unlock screen here or just unlocking into the dialer, will give you an animation or unlocking into the camera, and you can see the animation shows what you’re doing isn’t just popping out of nowhere. It’S coming from somewhere and same with the new app drawer. It springs to life out of that button, instead of fading in out of nowhere like before and you’ll, see a lot more transitions and animations all over the place in lollipop just like this.
So it keeps with the whole theme, and i actually consider that a feature it’s legitimately helping with creating an intuitive ui, although it still doesn’t help that the back button in android is still just as inconsistent as it has been in previous versions. But there are a lot more helpful animations that you’ll notice every time you pick up the phone, which is really cool, and it’s also awesome to see these animations really always running at a pretty high decent frame rate, especially since this is a nexus 5 a one Year old phone and hopefully android l on older devices or lower end ones, will still be just this fast. At least i hope so so if you’re thinking nexus 6 is going to be too big, looks like nexus 5 is beginning to look like a steal at under 400 bucks. So, first off there’s a new google launcher, app drawer and wallpapers.
Now all material design themed. If that makes any sense, i already showed you the app drawer animation but check out these new wallpapers. Here too, some of them are pretty sweet.
Looking and i have my favorites but i’ll link a downloadable album in the description right below that like button. If you want to check them out too uh next is the notification area, which has also been redone. So you can see all your notifications and obviously all the same functionality as before. But now you have a clear all button which was gone in the previous build. So thank gosh, it’s back and you have another swipe down to get into your quick settings or two finger swipe.
If you want so you have your brightness slider, which wasn’t there before. That was another click away, and you also have wi-fi and bluetooth, toggles, etc. Some new stuff here that wasn’t in kitkat, you have a flashlight toggle, which is new, very nice and a screen orientation, lock again very useful for many and a screencast button which will allow you to screencast to a tv. If you have a chromecast, also that second swipe down reveals a bunch of information with that smooth animation again, showing you your time, a clickable alarm text, a clickable battery percentage to show your battery settings a clickable shortcut to settings and a profile switcher. So now you can have multiple profiles on android on your phone, just like you could on a tablet.
If you share one, and you can have two people signed in three people signed in or if you want to just let someone borrow your phone for a day or something give him that guest account, which is basically just like. You got a brand new phone, no apps or anything are installed. They can pick their own apps to install and they don’t see any of your media and then you can just password protect your main account and you’re good.
But if you switch back, that’ll actually show you that when you get to your lock screen, the lock screen also now shows notifications, which is pretty cool. It’S just like in ios, except swiping them away. Here, doesn’t open them and dismisses them. If you want to open one, you actually have to double tap it to open the app so here’s another trick with the notification area. You can hold down any notification to see what app is showing it, and then you can go into that app and go to the app settings to change whether or not that app can show you any more really useful.
If some game keeps pestering you to buy the premium version or something annoying like that, there’s also now a shortcut to three different: do not disturb modes when you tap the volume button. So if you leave all that’s just normal just continues to show all notifications. Priority will only show the most important notifications and your alarms and when you switch to none that will not let anything through not even alarms it totally silences your phone. So you can pick the amount of time it stays in that mode. So if you have a 45 minute commute, you can have it silenced for the hour that you’re driving and then it automatically turns off. Also you can choose what priority mode includes. So you can choose to have text messages included or calls included, basically customize it to your liking. I always leave on priority mode when i go to sleep so that the only thing that can wake me up is my alarm. So there’s also new look inside some of the stock apps in android 5.0, the dialer looks very material design-y. It’S super round super flat. There are animations everywhere, there’s a new in-call look. So if you call someone and it looks pretty clean, the one thing i don’t like is that the hang up button is now way smaller.
I actually liked it when it was a huge full screen thing. So i could just end the call without thinking, but i guess i’ll have to get used to the smaller centered one and there are other little things all around android. 5.0.
Really that you might not even notice for a while even using the phone, a fun one is that the screen off animation is actually very, very slowly fading to black and white. Before it turns off your display, pretty damn cool that you may not even notice for a while. The new setup process in android 5 is a lot easier when you first sign into your google account for the first time, especially if you have two-step authentication. That is a huge improvement.
Android beam now allows you to share any file type where you can only really share links and images before and the keyboard in android is redesigned and the letter presses look a little bit different from before as well. You can also use nfc or bluetooth devices like smartwatches, for example, as a trusted device to let you bypass your lock password. They call this smart lock and it works very well. I use it with my moto 360 all the time, and also now, if you have multiple google chrome tabs open, all of them will show up as separate activities in your multitasking carousel, so you can open them up or close them by swiping away one by one.
In here oh – and you also notice, they kept google search available in the multitasking menu as well. I don’t know how useful that is, but it’s there, the new clock, believe it or not. The clock app changes the color of the background, depending on the time of day. So, if you’re in the middle of the day, when the sun’s out it matches the sky and it’s all blue at night, it goes dark, purple, etc.
I think that’s pretty neat and there’s now a battery saver mode that prompts you to turn itself on at about 15 and once you turn the battery saver mode on your notification bar and bottom nav bar turn bright orange. So you can’t accidentally forget you have the mode on, and this will turn off most of your background data. It turns the vibration motor off basically turns your phone into a local media player, but hey it gets you an extra hour or so out of the end of your battery, which can be useful for a lot of people. Now, here’s one more really good. One screen pinning so let’s say your friend wants to borrow your phone and say: hey dude. Let me borrow your phone. I just want to make a call and i trust you friend. I trust that you’re gon na just borrow my phone and make a call and not buy a three thousand dollar paper shredder on amazon two minutes later.
But if i can guarantee that, if i can guarantee you only use the phone, then that would be really nice. So if you go into security settings and enable screen pinning you can then go into your multitasking app pick the app you want to screen, pin let’s say the dialer and then you can pin that app to be the only app that you can use. So then, you can confidently hand him your phone, knowing that he can’t get out of the dialer or do anything else crazy. He can just call someone and that’s it, of course, assuming he doesn’t know how to exit screen pinning mode, which is a long press of the back and recent apps button at the same time.
But honestly, he probably won’t – and i mean imagine, handing this to a kid or something with a game screen pinned that sounds like endless entertainment to me. So in summary, it seems like android l is coming along really well uh. I was at first worried about the lighter look.
Everything seems to be bright, white or very pale and light looking compared to the total opposite, which would be hollow of android 4.0, which was all dark. So it’s something we need to get used to, but other than that i’m liking a lot of what i’m seeing in android l, and i can’t wait to see the final final version on the nexus 6 and the nexus 9.. But until then i’m going to leave it at that. I can’t wait to get the new hardware in hand. Thank you for watching leave a thumbs up. If you enjoyed i’ll talk to you guys in the next article peace .