- [Alex] Over the years some Android versions
have brought massive technical
and visual changes, while others have tightened
up the screws and added polish
without shaking things up too much.
The new release of Android for 2017
and beyond, Android 8.0 Oreo fits somewhere
in between these two extremes.
Android is pretty stable at this point,
so broad sweeping changes are less necessary
with every new version.
As a result, the new version isn't really
about big, obvious new features.
Instead it's the sum
of many, many, smaller changes
which help make it the most mature
and powerful version of Android to date.
I'm Alex from Android Central,
and this is our review of Android 8.0 Oreo.
(electronic music)
Most of us see Android through the lens
of whichever manufacturer's UI we choose,
but the design direction
of Vanilla Android is still relevant.
After all, more phone makers than ever
are sticking to stock these days.
The stock Android's UI hasn't changed
all that much in Oreo though.
If you're only looking for UI changes,
you might spot just one,
the brighter colour palate
for the Quick Settings area.
It's now light grey, not dark grey, reflecting
a similar colour change in the Stock Settings app.
Whether that's good or bad is
mostly a matter of personal taste.
The Quick Settings panel has been rearranged too,
bringing the Settings, User Switching,
and Edit shortcuts further down, helpfully making
these easier to reach on larger phones.
The retooled Settings app is
another big visual change.
The slide out hamburger navigation panel added
in Nougat has been removed
and instead Google has made navigation simpler
by redesigning each of the 13 submenus
to make things easier to find.
The new Battery Settings page is
a great example of this.
The screen on time is now showing right up top
along with the time since your last full charge.
Scroll down a little and you'll see
a most battery hungry apps.
You need to look below the surface
to spot many of the other visual changes in Oreo.
For instance Google has finally started
to bring a sense of order to app icons
with new adaptive icons
which let you choose
between five different cut out types.
This means manufacturers like
Samsung, Huawai, and LG which like
to use their own cut out shape now have
more reliable way to do this,
that doesn't result in bad, weird looking icons
for third party apps.
Android's animations haven't changed
a whole lot in Oreo
but there are a couple of new stripes
in the notificatioqan shade
to add to the polish of Google's material design.
Icons smoothly transition
from the Status bar
into their Notification column
before springing up into place
and icons now juggle themselves around
in the Status bar as new alerts arrive
making the system feel a bit more dynamic.
And these are small changes but they go
a long way towards making this important area
of the system feel more lively and fun.
Finally it's worth mentioning
a handful of upgrades to that most important
of smartphone features, emoji.
Oreo has a handful of new emoji
while redesigning the icons themselves
and to move away
from the old Android style blobs.
And thanks to a new compatibility layer,
developers can support these in apps
going all the way back to KitKat.
Android notifications were overhauled in Nougat
and Oreo intros a handful of changes
to make the daily fire hose
of alerts a little more manageable.
The big new thing is notification channels.
A new feature which brings categories of notifications`
to your apps so you can filter
different kinds of alerts
from the set map.
A social app for instance might have channels
with direct messages, status updates,
likes or other interactions
And you can then choose how your alerted
with notifications in each of these categories,
Sound, Vibration, LED
or you can even block notifications
from some channels altogether.
Now there is a certain amount
of micromanagement involved here.
It's gonna take time
and a lot of individual app updates
before we're gonna know
how successful this feature will be.
Maybe notification channels will be
generally useful for everyone
or perhaps we'll all be
to lazy to bother with them.
Speaking of laziness, Oreo also lets you snooze
individual notification groups temporarily
by swiping right and hitting the clock icon.
These case here is pretty obvious.
You can now dismiss a notification
you don't want to deal with right away
without getting rid of it permanently.
Elsewhere media player apps like
Google Play Music, YouTube and Spotify
can bring a splash of colour
to their notifications drawing up
on the main colours of alta bars.
It is a little bit distracting
and not everyone is a fan of this new feature
but it does at least set media notifications apart
from the rest of the clutter.
Meanwhile persistent notifications
from Google Maps to BPN apps
or anything else that might be running
in the background of being de-cluttered.
These now shrink down
to a shorter notification card
and a slightly darker shade
which also helps set them apart visually.
And that's important because Android itself,
now shows you a persistent notification
if apps are using power in the background.
That's all part of Google tightening the screws
on background apps in 8.0
which we'll get to a little bit later.
The notification changes don't stop there though.
Ambient display mostly untouched since the days
of the good o'l Nexus 6,
finally gets a bit of an overhaul in Oreo.
The main ambient display area actually shows
you less information than it did on Nougat
with only the time and a series
of icons appearing when the phone is raised.
The other side of that coin is
individual modifications now flash up
in a more user friendly way,
which is better for quickly glancing at
in incoming message or email.
Balancing information density
and glanceability is always a tricky proposition
but I think Google's made the right call here.
And there's an altogether new way
to see your notifications in 8.0.
Android now has launcher show you
individual app notifications
with the notification badges feature.
After the pending notification will
display a coloured dots and long pressing
to open the app shortcut menu, will show
your notifications alongside other shortcuts.
That's not the only new trick hiding
behind the app shortcut menu in Oreo.
A new widget shortcut button frees users
from long, cumbersome widget menus
with an easy way to see just he widgets
from a particular app.
Picture-in-picture has been part
of Android TV for the past year
but Android 8.0 finally brings it
to phones and tablets,
introducing a potentially huge feature
for owners of extra large phones
and convertibles like the mightily ageing Pixel C.
Picture in picture mode varies a little depending
on how the developer implements it
but basically it lets you start
a video in Google with one app,
then hit the home key to shrink it down
to a smaller floating window,
with its own playback controls.
You can resize and move it around the screen
in the foreground while opening and using
other apps as normal in the background.
And yes, if you're really crazy
you can even use multi-windows
at the same time as picture-in-picture.
It's similar to multi-window
as introduced as standard in Nougat
and while you can still use multi-window
to split the screen
between a video and another app,
picture-in-picture is just
a much more elegant approach.
It's one of a few new features that should help
make Android tablets more appealing
to professional users
and they're a few others here,
support for wide gamut colour in app should make
Android a better fit for photographers.
While the new Audio API will reduce
audio latency and bring Android a step closer
to taking on Garage Band on the iPad.
But lets be clear here,
however good Oreo is Android tablets still have
a long way to go
before they can challenge Apple's dominance.
Everyone hates typing passwords,
especially on glass.
The tedium of password entry has spawned
an entire industry of password managers
but they still require a lot
of frustrating copying and pasting.
So in Oreo, Google has tackled
the password pain put on two fronts.
Firstly AutoFill with Google can
help you sign in to your accounts
on your phone using information already stored
in your Google account.
So if you've signed into Twitter
on the web through Chrome,
you can then pull in these details
to sign into the app on your Android phone.
And thanks to the new AutoFill APIs,
password managers will be able
to serve up passwords to other apps automatically
without any hoping back and forth
or copy pasting between text fields.
The one password guys gave us a sneak peak
at how this will work a few months back,
again all of this will require devs
to update their apps to target Android 8.0.
In any case, both of these address
the major pain point
of entering complex passwords on a touchscreen.
On a related note,
Android is also getting smarter
about how it handles
specific info and text fields.
In the new version,
Google's machine learning figures
out what kind of data you've selected
and offers relevant text to options.
For example, a shortcut to the Dialer app
for phone numbers.
For Google Maps for addresses or place names.
There's a lot going on behind the scenes
in Android 8.0 too.
The main under the hood changes should help
in two important areas that
everyone can relate to,
battery life and faster firmware updates.
Firstly, Oreo makes it harder
for badly behaving apps to devour your battery
by limiting what apps can do
when they're not in the foreground.
Google uses these restrictions to nudge
developers towards Android's Job Schedule feature
which handles background tasks
in a more efficient way.
You can't really see this working but it's there
and it'll help battery life
on every device that runs Oreo.
As for OS updates,
well through its new project Treble,
Google has created a module structure that
hardware companies can use
to separate out their own customizations
from the core Android OS.
The idea is this will make it easier
to push out firmware updates without completely
reinventing the wheel every time.
With Treble, companies can update Android
without re-engineering their own customizations.
This isn't a cure all for Android's update woes
but it should significantly reduce
the work load required to update a phone shipping
on 8.0 to say Android 9.0 next year.
It's gonna take time to determine how much
of a success project Treble will be
and the device manufacturers are still gonna have
to play ball here if it's gonna work
but it is a step in the right direction.
It's hard to get excited about any single feature
in Android 8.0 even if
you're a big phone nerd, like me.
That's probably because
Android's more mature these days and less in need
of big sweeping user facing changes,
especially on phones.
As a result, Oreo is
the sum of many smaller changes that make
the OS easier to use with better performance,
fewer pain points and added convenience.
Android still feels like Android
but in 8.0 it's more polished than ever.
And fortunately the stable build of Oreo is
free from the early Wonka defect, the first round
of Android 7.0 releases last year.
In the grand scheme of things,
Treble could turn out to be the most significant
edition this version of Android.
As Google finally picks
away the technical barriers keeping
so many phones on older versions of the OS.
At the same time picture-in-picture mode,
as well as refinements to keyboard navigation
see Android shuffling close
to becoming a desktop OS.
Now there's still
a good distance left to travel there.
On the surface then,
this is a fairly safe release cycle
for Android, evolution not revolution.
But despite the lack
of an exciting headline feature,
Oreo is an important update.
And for Pixel and Nexus owners luck enough
to be on the early release track,
they'll be among the first
to experience the most stable
and capable Android release in years.
That's it for now, thanks for watching
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