Hey, what's up guys, ThioJoe here
and, recently, I got the pixel phone by Google
and it runs Android 7.1 so I thought you
guys would be interested in 10 of the
coolest new features in Android 7.1 Nougat,
whether you have a Pixel phone or
if you're going to update your phone to it
in the future.
Oh, and by the way, these aren't really gonna be
in any particular order.
Starting off, the first one is app shortcuts with
a long press. This is a pretty popular one,
most you guys already know about this,
but basically, now on many apps you
can long press on that icon and it will
bring up some shortcuts that you can
instantly jump to and do an action in
that app so you don't have to click on
the app, navigate to whatever button, very
similar to Apple's Force Touch on their iPhone.
So, one specific example is in
Google Chrome, you can long press it and
it gives you the option to bring up a
regular or incognito tab right away.
These shortcuts do need to be added by
the developers so there are not really
that many apps yet that support it, it's
mostly just Google made apps obviously,
but it's still super convenient, I'm sure
we're going to start to see these very soon.
Next, number two is night light mode
which is a very similar feature to the
iPhone's Night Shift as well as the
program Flux if you have that on desktop.
So, what this basically does is remove
blue light from the screen specifically
at night and shift it more towards orange
because we know several studies have shown
that blue light, bright screens, tend to
keep you up at night, so this will remove
that light that interferes with your
ability to fall asleep, and I'm really
glad they added this feature because
before, on older versions, you had to use
these third-party apps that didn't
really work, they just kinda overlay this
ugly red filter, it looked terrible
I'm just glad they have it as a native
feature now. Next, number three is the
system UI tuner which is actually kind
of a hidden feature. What you do to
enable this is pull down the
notifications menu and then you hold
down the cogwheel and a wrench will
appear to show that it's enabled and now
in the settings you have a system UI
tuner menu and this will give you some
extra options that aren't usually
available so for example enabling the
battery percentage to show up in the
status bar
and adding some extra toggles in the status
bar that you can change and it also
gives you power notification tools which
is really useful
it lets you have way more control over
what notifications each app can do or
can't do. So, for example, if one app is
being really annoying, you can set it so
it can't wake up the screen or can't
interrupt anything or can't even show
notifications at all. Gives you a lot
of fine detail control. Number four is an
awesome new feature for when Android has
to update. Before, you guys might have
known, every time you update the phone
when you rebooted it, you have to wait for
every app to compile and if you had a
lot of apps, it took forever and you just
couldn't even use your phone. Now, with
the just-in-time feature, it does that
all in the background, so you don't have
to wait for that to happen during boot,
so, it boots instantly and the apps just
compile when you can actually still use
your phone.
So, now updates are just gonna be way
more easier, save you a ton of time,
no more waiting after you update.
Number five is emergency information and the
ability to add medical information that
is relevant in an emergency that is
accessible from the lock screen. You can
add information like blood type, your
name, your medications you're on, etc. so
if you pass out or something
paramedics can look at your phone and
get all that relevant information.
The only issue I see is that it's kind
of hidden away from the lock screen, you have
to click emergency then click emergency
information a couple times, and then it
shows you the information, so I don't
think most people are going to even know
that this is there, so might not help as
much but I guess if these medics are
taught that that information is there,
might still be useful. Next, number six
are "moves," which are basically like
physical gestures you can do to activate
certain things for example on the
fingerprint sensor you can swipe down
your finger to bring down the status bar
and show you notifications.
There's also one where you can press the
power button twice and anywhere you are
will instantly jump to the camera
although I think that is in a lot of
phones already, and if you're already in
the camera app, you can twist your hand
two times, and it will switch between the
selfie camera, and the back camera without
having to press any buttons. So these are
just kind of neat, there's only a few
right now but they might add more in the
future. Number seven is the Daydream VR
platform, so Google recently implemented
native virtual reality support and
they also announced a headset, a physical
headset to use with this phone, called
the Daydream View.
Unfortunately, I don't have one of these
new headsets yet so I can't show you it
yet, I will be getting one, but it'll
still be good to see developers creating
cool new VR apps and it'll be
interesting to see what kind of stuff
they come up with.
Now, next, number eight is call-blocking
and spam protection.
Basically, if you go to the phone app,
then you go to the settings, there's an
option to add specific numbers to a
block list, so if you're getting a spam
call a bunch of times a week, or one
person you just want to completely
ignore, you can add that number of the
block list and you won't have to hear
from them.
Also, they added a spam blocking feature,
it's on by default, you can see that in
the settings, so this will just block
spam and scams, so that's nice.
Coming near the end, number nine, is a
small new feature but still appreciated.
Now, if you go into the app switcher and
scroll all the way to the top
it will now show a "clear all" option so
if you want to clear out all the recent
apps, you don't have to swipe each one
individually anymore, on stock Android.
Obviously, other phones & skins like
Samsung have had this for a while but
now it's nice that they added it into
the native Android. And finally, number
ten is hundreds of new emojis. I think we
can all appreciate this. It complies now
with Unicode 9 which added a bunch of them,
and one of the notable things is now for
most of the people emojis you can have
different skin color so it's supposed to
be gender and race neutral so you can
basically pick whatever one you want and
what you do, is when there's a person
emoji, you can hold down on that and it
will show you all sorts of different
variations of that emoji, so if you want
a white person or black person or a
woman or man, you can now pick any of
those by holding it down, and it also does
that on the hand emojis
although I don't really know if there's
any other emojis that have options
besides the people ones, like the object
ones, I think they're all just the same.
And, so, that's it.
Those are 10 of the coolest features,
I thought, that were added to Android 7.1
and a couple of them even to 7.0.
I would love to hear what you guys
think, if I missed any big ones that you
think I should mention, let us know down in the
comments section, we can talk about that
down there. And if you like this video
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Also, if you guys want to keep watching,
I've got some other videos right here
that you should enjoy, you can click on
these even if you're on a phone, it's a
new type of annotation, so I hope you
enjoy those as well. So again, I'm looking
forward to hearing from you guys
hopefully you enjoyed this video, thanks so
much for watching, I'll see you next time.
Have a good one.