Android L
Hi everyone, So here we are with Android L Google's latest Android operating system that they've
put into developer
preview over the last couple of days. Now the first thing you kind of notice is that not
a lot has changed Android L
necessarily with the home screen other than our navigation
buttons along the bottom here. Now these are quite a departure from what we had
before
kind of re-skinning and they're certainly very reminiscent of PlayStation buttons.
Not completely sure I like it necessarily but you know it's only an
icon at the end of the day
and the functionality is still exactly the same. Back, home
and your quick launch area for previous applications that you've
been running. Now there's not a lot of major changes really within Android L
the home screen area as such, widgets still look the same,
icons look relatively the same and have folders and work pretty much
the same way they did before. But however when you come to the actual notification
area
this is where you can really see some changes. For starters, the new material design,
for starters the new material design
is in full effect within the notification shade allowing for
this translucent background. Cards can actually sit
on their own little separate area and have their own kind
of look and feel to them. If we come into cards, which isn't unfortunately working
properly
in all cases at the moment. Those Google Now cards seemingly not triggering Google Now but
each of your notifications it Android L
sits on its own little element as it were and another notification will appear underneath that
and so on. You can dismiss notifications just by swiping from one side to the
other
but like I say it doesn't seem to be working with Google Now cards at the moment for some reason.
And within this notification shade we have the quick settings option which
brings us into things like our wifi, our Bluetooth and as you'll notice a new
option for cast screen.
If you happen to have a Chromecast you'll be able to hit that button
and mirror your entire screen to the Chromecast on your television set.
However, as of today, one day after the launch of
Android L developer preview, we can't get the functionality to work
even though the YouTube app will happily stream to Chromecast from this device
whenever we try and use this cast screen option it either
doesn't find the Chromecast for around half an hour. If it does manage to find it, which
is extraordinarily rare Android L
as soon as you actually try and interact with the Chromecast, the Chromecast seems to go into
kind of reboot basically and it never starts the content,
the device just hangs up. I think we're waiting for
an update from Google for the Chromecast to really enable that functionality
at this time.
One of the other really interesting things that they've added
is kind of a quality of life thing. Now when you come onto your
volume controllers, using the buttons on the side Android L
you've now got an option for do not disturb, so by tapping that
you can set how long you would like to not be disturbed for.
A really, really cool feature. You've got more settings there as well
which gives you a few more granular controls to how
that's going to work or is it for everybody, is it only for starred contacts,
contacts only, so some nice functionality there that really is quality of life more than
anything else. It's a nice feature to have.
When we kind of come in to our settings area this probably seems the biggest
tweaks and changes to the look and feel really.
So it's not exactly a major departure, they've not kind of radically
redesigned this necessarily. It just looks nicer. It's making use of white space now
and those kind of nice flat icons we've got used to from Android L preview.
Now when we kind of come through here, there's not, like I say, a huge number
of changes necessarily. They tend to really be tweaks
and tidy-ups just making things look a little bit nicer, having toggles and so on.
If we come to storage you can see things haven't really changed all that much.
One of the major changes though is within battery Android L
this is where some quite exciting stuff has happened. Not only is there a new way
for developers to kind of understand how their application's draining your battery
but there's now a new functionality for you as an end-user to see, well,
how long is it going to take to actually charge your device?
How long has the battery got left before it will completely discharge?
Now I've got this currently plugged into our capture system so it's giving some
slightly strange results because the voltage it comes off is a bit strange but
essentially if you click on here you can see exactly what has been using
each of the kind of key power areas of drain,
mobile signal, GPS, wifi, awake, so has the device been forced to stay awake
which is always a big battery drain and at what time-frequency, Android L
how long was that drain going on for. I believe if you've got a solid bar
that effectively means it was solidly using power at that time.
If you see these small little tiny bars as it were
those are where the power of the device has just flicked on to say the GPS,
so it's used power for a very small amount of time. It's going to give a pretty good indicator as to
how your device is draining power. Likewise, if we come into the other areas
not really a lot that it will tell you that's anything new here particularly.
You've got the battery saver option as well now
which is quite nice, turning that on and it will also kick in at Android L
15 percent battery, or you can set that to however you like. Now really what this does is it
acts as a governor on the CPU GPU screen and few other aspects most likely wifi
as well.
It drops them into a low-power state so where we would
normally notice something like that is with the screen brightness, that's usually the most obvious one.
So, you know, your device has hit 15 percent of power
and Android will now drop you into low-power state. What that will effectively mean
is it just drops the brightness on the screen, slows the CPU and the GPU
down Android L
and potentially drops the wifi and doesn't make the wifi ping out quite as often as it would do
normally.
Now all of this means that you're going to save little bit more battery.
Too early to tell how well this is working but one thing I've noticed with Android L
is we seem to have a lot of things that could be described as
positively Samsung-esque.
I wonder if it's part of this cross-licensing deal they've done which now allows Google to actually
include some of these things that before
Samsung were like, well no, we kind of develop that first. That's kind of our thing
for our devices. There's also some elements that are a little bit HTC-like in here as well
in places. Android L
So let's move back on as it were.
Now when we kind of have a look at things like the phone dialler, this has also taken
quite a major change. It's now very flat, it's quite colourful,
this blue hue across the top here,
I'm not overly fond of it, It's a little bit garish and I hope they'll
allow us to tweak that, potentially. Hopefully maybe third-party developers and
the framework
guys will expose framework should I say, will come up with a way to tweak this
but
it looks really, really cool and the animations are really
slickly done and really, really nice. As you
flick across you can come in and go through all of your contacts and so on
and you can see any time you haven't got an image applied you've got
instead a really really nice flat Android L
design icon with the first letter of the person's name
embedded into it. It looks really really cool
Android L