So let's take a look now at Android 4.4. Let's have a look at some of the things that have
changed. Now with Android 4.4 on a Nexus device
it's free from all of the extras that the main manufacturers like Samsung, HTC
load onto their devices. Instead we get what does Google want from its
Android device. Things are very cut down you get a
slim set of Google applications and no extra fluff or bloatware.
Now the first thing to notice is you could almost call it the candification
of interfaces. Certainly it feels like it's taken a little
bit of a leaf out of the IOS Playbook but
what they/'ve gone for here is something that's full fully colourful
bright, part of that is being given by the wallpaper that comes as default
but in part also if you look at the icons you'll notice they're a much higher
resolution
and there's really nice anti-aliasing going on.
You can't see any jagged lines or edges or anything like that
and the icons have a kind of pop to them that was kind of missing I think in the
previous versions of default Android as it were.
Overall everything kind of just feels that little bit
more polished and groovy I think is probably the way to put it.
and groovy I think is probably the way to put it.
Yes, that's it. Android 4.4 KitKat is groovy looking.
You can debate that one if you like in the comments but I think it's groovy looking.
They've also for instance, a few of these items have been downloaded
just as my system's auto back up kicks in and just starts delivering all my apps to me
but they've now added a settings icon within the app tray which I
don't ever remember being there before or if it was, it had a really
ugly looking icon for it. There's now a nice icon that will take you straight in to your
settings
which obviously if you long press and you can just drop that wherever you happen to want it to be.
Standard Android stuff. There's nothing new there as it were.
There's no pinch mechanism so if you want to pinch between your home screens
forget it that's not part of the Android experience, when you're looking at the pure Google
Android.
One of the things that was interesting is
they've released a recording tool
which is apparently available for developers. Now I thought it was actually included
as part of Android 4.4
out of the box but it doesn't appear to be, or at least I can't find it anywhere.
Maybe you have to go in and turn that on through developer tools.
A lot of the stuff you will know pretty well, you know, it's the Google
services, it's Google+, it's the gallery app
it's Drive, it's Chrome,
you know the standard stuff that comes with Android 4.4. Unfortunately made
a little bit more difficult here by auto back up having kicked in and deciding to drop all of
my apps to me.
Although on the plus side at least I don't have to go and download them all again.
And so one of the things that's always worth looking at on a new Nexus device
is having a look at how the settings and notification shade area has changed
so one of the main things is they now look quite a bit nicer than they used to, going
with this kind of cool black and white vibe and
feels like it has more pop to it than it used to do.
It looked a bit mucky before in my opinion but also if we come into here we can get into our
settings area.
This stuff is pretty much the muchness.I haven't noticed any major changes in here particularly. The
only big one is this printing option down at the bottom.
That I do not remember being part of previous
Android experiences and was mentioned that it was going to get baked directly into
the operating system from here on out.
So if you happen to use cloud printing or if you have any of the
Google Cloud Print Services available or the HP print
remote print then effectively you can print directly from your Android device
to any printer that your Google Account knows about. Very handy
I must say. So we've got our usual thing going on, our wifi
Bluetooth. One major change they've made in Android 4.4
is better support for low-power Bluetooth devices
things like fit bit and so on. If we
come into more we've got our airplane mode
nfc, default SMS app, now this is new and this
allows you, if you have multiple different
short messaging service apps on your device you can pick
which one will be the default app. Fantastic and about time too.
And one thing they've done with Google hangouts is integrate SMS and hangouts into one
application.
So now hangouts becomes your messaging app, you don't have
hangouts, Google talk, SMS app and everything else.
You just have one app to do everything. Like I say, for manufacturers developers and so on,
you can hook into this and if you have an SMS app
you'll be able to make it the default from now on. That is really really great
news. You can just pick which app you want to use and you're not constantly fighting
notifications
all the time. NFC, some changes to the way NFC works
purely from the point of view of making payments, that's one of the big things they've
done here. So NFC now has an alternative secure mode effectively
which makes it work properly with the way that the payment processors and
providers wanted it to work.
This now should remove a lot of the problems we had with Google Wallet not being
compatible with anything
on the payment side of things. So it will be very good to see that
hopefully this year, I keep saying that every year but hopefully this will be the year
NFC catches on.
Tethering and portable hotspot, VPN,
you do your mobile networks, plan your mobile broadcasts in there.
Now, one of the other new areas is home. Now in here you can
basically set what your launcher is going to be so that's the default launcher
and I've also got smart launcher that's just installed as well from my auto backup.
And effectively you can now set these or delete them
as necessary. That is going to make life so much easier for a lot of people me especially
who uses a lot of different launchers. No more hacking basically to make sure your
launcher always uses the default when you hit your back button.
In sound we've got the usual standard kind of stuff, adjust your volume, choose your
ringtone,
set to vibrate when ringing, dial touch and everything like that.
Lock sounds, touch sounds which I'm so pleased the've turned off by default.
Thank you Google you have no idea how annoying it is when, obviously I have to
reinstall my device quite often for new ROMS and
updates and fiddling around with it and one of the most annoying things is having to
go through the initial set up hearing ker-blip, ker blip,
or blip blip blip every time I touch something. So having that turned off by default
is fantastic you can of course turn that on if you need to, why would you?
Display.
In here we can adjust our brightness uses the Google standard brightness slider
nothing special there. Wallpaper this is where we can set our Android
wallpaper including new smart wallpapers
I'm not actually sure about those yet. Live wallpaper is in there,
nothing particularly exciting, gallery just my photos basically
and obviously wallpapers at the bottom which includes a couple of
new ones by the looks of it. Yes,
very nice, let's have a bit of that shall we?
Oops, do that properly. Set wallpaper up at
the top. There we go. There's also your sleep time out and your auto rotate settings.
Sleep time out this is how long the screen will stay on for before it goes off
saving your battery. You've got the daydream
which you can set to pretty much all the stuff you could do before. They haven't
expanded that unfortunately. So you've got photo frames
that's one of my apps that's added itself in, standard colours and the
clock obviously. Set your fonts
pulse notification light, I always get that one mixed up.Get them the wrong way round.
Effectively whenever you get a message or an alert on your device
it will
pulse the notification light which is somewhere
here I think. Where is it on the Nexus 5? That's a really interesting point.
Does it have one? Must have.
Well, we will find out where the pulse light is because actually
I'm not sure it's got one, which would be interesting and you've also got access to
wireless display if you want to,
which is known as Mirror cast I believe, to give it its technical term.
If we come into storage this is where we can do our space as you can see
I've only got 9gig available now, 12gig overall this was a 16 gig
Nexus 5 model and obviously a load of my apps have now installed themselves.
Interesting to note though, if you got the Galaxy S4
then you actually only got 9gig of available space because of all of the extra
stuff
that Samsung had installed. So it's really nice here that a 16 gig device
actually had 12.5 gig available for me to install things
even now, when I've installed all of my stuff in the auto backup I still have
nearly as much space as a Samsung would out of the box.
Kind of shows you how bloated some of these main manufacturers have become with their
operating systems.
You know, one thing that we really need to see from Android is
more space as default when you take it out of the box not
less because you're adding more and more useless features so
good on Google for keeping things slim and making sure that you know
as many gig as possible is free for us. Battery, this is very standard stuff
shows you what's running in your device right now
and what's been using up space over the preceding
time period. So you can see here my screen is draining 30% of my battery
Android OS 15% Android system etcetera.
Very handy way of just seeing what's going on on the device
and what might be killing your battery. If we go into apps
again whole standard stuff. They've not made many tweaks here really. I think
be a lot easier you know everything's gonna be grey
so we've got the nice black background, grey status bars etcetera.
But the interface generally hasn't changed that much
on the Android 4.4 update.
Location we can turn our location services on or off and we can also now
change how accurate we would like that to be and it gives a bit more information over 4.3
on what's really going on there. If you drop into battery saving mode it will just do
wifi and mobile networks to estimate location put it on high and it will kick in
the GPS as well. Do device only, use GPS to pinpoint the location.
So you've got a few choices now as to how you want location to work
and more importantly thank you Google,
it actually explained properly how that works and how it really relates to
saving your battery etcetera.
Security, it's your screen locks it's your widgets on your home screen encrypting your phone
passwords everything like that and would you
allow unknown sources always worth killing in my opinion
and install from internal storage so if there's anything security-related
you will find it in there. Language and input this is where your keyboards are kept.
As you can see I've got quite a few including Google Hindi input
opinion even.
Which I've definitely never installed previously, and Google Korea,
definitely never installed that one but presumably that is just defaulted
in for us which is nice. Now with backup and reset what they've allowed you to do is to back up
absolutely everything into the cloud now
up to Google services so you can go into there and it just has your
standard options in there
basically. Date and time, accessibility and the aforementioned printing tool
But overall there's not a huge amount of new stuff for Android 4.4 in the settings.
A lot of it really is under the hood with Android 4.4 it's the little things that they've
done to really tweak it.
Much better memory use on low-powered devices with 512 RAM
new options for the NFC. A few new tweaks here and there and new stuff for developers but
overall Android 4.4 probably doesn't offer an awful lot to the average end user.
It doesn't suddenly make this the next big phone release or anything like that.
What it does do is incrementally update Android providing
newer hardware specifications for things like low-power Bluetooth etcetera
and all that is really really welcome anyway and what it ultimately means is that
you know the next generation of hardware coming out over the next 12 months
will be able to work with all of the latest gadgets but doing so
in a lower power profile as possible. Everything really with Android 4.4
feels a lot like when they released the first iteration of butter, which I think was 4.2 or 4.2.2
and it's almost about let's tweak this, let's fix this, let's
update this, there's no big revolutions here necessarily
in Android 4.4 but overall lots of little tweaks that add up to a very
welcome set of changes. One of the things that we always have to do