Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Top 5 Android N Features! (Dev Preview)”.
Hey what is up guys, mkbhd here and yeah? I know what you’re thinking most people don’t even have android m yet and yet we’re already getting a preview of the next version. Yup it’s earlier than normal. This year before google, i o and everything, and it’s loaded on this nexus 6p. So let’s take a look at the best new features in android n, so it’s going to be a lot of smaller stuff. First of all, there’s no version number that i can see, but it feels like this is going gon na, be something like android 6.1. A lot of what you’ll see here is redesigns.
So number one a redesigned settings app. So you can see it looks pretty similar to the marshmallow settings app, but in each category it’s starting to take advantage of the larger screens. These phones have, and it’s showing you a little information inside it before you have to click it so with battery without clicking it tells you how much battery you have left storage.
Tells you how much space you have open. Wi-Fi and bluetooth. Tell you what you’re connected to before you even open the settings, so that’s pretty cool and then you have, when you do click into a setting. You get a new option which is a swipe out side menu with links to all the other settings.
So you can use this bar to sort of navigate between submenus. If you know where you want to go – and it’s pretty quick – i don’t know if this actually saves any steps as far as the number of clicks, but it works well and you can kind of memorize where your most used settings are on the list. So you can definitely get to them pretty quickly. This way, i actually like the way it looks in landscape. I don’t use my phone and landscape that much, but it looks like the settings from android honeycomb back in the old tablet days, taking advantage of the bigger screen. All right. Number two is redesigned notifications, so you can see your notifications are a bit wider. Now they take up the whole width of the display and they show a lot more information now again really taking advantage of the bigger high-res displays we have and you can tap the little down arrow to expand or contract notifications or you can stick to the two-finger.
Drag, which is a lot easier to get that more information and then some apps, like first-party apps like gmail? Well, you expand so much that you can actually take individual action on each item. So notifications are bundled as they come in, but once you expand it, you can archive emails like one by one or pick a single email to take an action on like a reply, and i think more apps will start to pick this up too. So if you get like three twitter notifications, you can choose what to do with each one after you expand. So i like this – and you also now have a half swipe over to get to notification settings for that app.
I kind of liked the long press better, but that’s how you do it now and some apps will support inline replies in the notifications. So like hangouts, for example, the new hangouts app will let you reply to a message without ever leaving the notification panel and then get back to what you’re doing again. A lot of this stuff is new functionality to take advantage of your bigger screens. I, like it so number three is redesigned quick settings up top. This is something we’ve seen in skin versions of android before actually so, htc sense touchwiz. But now you can just pull down once and have these quick toggles to frequently use functions like wi-fi or bluetooth, or your flashlight or whatever, when you pull down again.
That’S when you get to your quick settings that you’re familiar with with the bigger panel and it’s paginated, so you can swipe across between screens as many as you want here and there’s also a new edit button right up front. So you can go in there and move stuff around move stuff in move stuff out, move stuff into the top five, so it becomes a quick setting, etc. So this is classic android full-on customization fun. You can really set the most used functions right up top to be at your fingertips. Number four is a redesigned multitasking, so this is definitely my new favorite change in android n. So right off the bat, the multitasking cards are way bigger.
So it lets you see more info in your last used app on the screen, which is pretty cool and then, when you’re in an app and you hit the multitasking button, it brings the app you’re in way down to the bottom, because you don’t want to go Back into that same app, i’ve done that by accident a lot. So now, when you hit the button, it just gets out the way and shows you a big card of your second to last, most used app. So now what it gets right is one of my favorite additions, which is the double tap it kind of acts like a quick, app, switcher and swaps back with your most recently used app.
I think it’s awesome. It’S handy for quick copy, paste stuff or just going back and forth between two apps. You use a lot like twitter and reddit and back to twitter, whatever you’re doing it’s pretty handy and then new to stock android. We now have split screen multitasking. So when you’re in an app you hold the multitasking button, then pick another app and then you’re in, and this is awesome. We again used to only see this in skins, but now you can grab the bar in the middle and resize the multitasking windows or use the bar to close one out entirely.
I got ta say for a developer preview. This is really smooth like. I didn’t expect it to be this good at all, but it’s nice and stable and it works. It works in landscape too. So i’m hoping i’m hoping that a bunch of apps now that this is in the developer preview will quickly support this in a few months down the road.
So we get this new version. Early app developers get to build it in and then when the new version of android comes out like a new nexus, almost everyone’s apps already works with split screen. All right number, five. Last but not least, is the dark mode.
It was kind of buried in the last android m developer preview. But again we have a functional night mode in android, which essentially reverses the colors in a major core apps like settings to be dark behind the green, which can be useful if you’re, using your phone at night or at some place where you don’t want it to Blast light everywhere, it still is in system tuner, so you don’t exactly have it at your fingertips, but you do get to dig in and mess around with it and it even has a feature to automatically turn on at sunset kind of like the night mode in Google maps nice, so there you have it there’s a bunch of other little stuff here and there like an improved doze that should even work to help save battery life when the phone is in your pocket and there’s also a data saver mode. So when you just know you’re going to run out of data, you can kind of keep your phone in check there, but that’s the best of what’s new in android n.
So far again, it’s just a developer preview number one. So more changes and features will be added before the final version this summer. Yes, the app drawer is still here, looks like we’re keeping that.
But let me know what you think: what’s your favorite new item personally, i’m all about that double tap app switcher. But that’s just me. Thanks for watching and i’ll talk to you guys in the next one peace you .