- If you're used to spending six, seven,
800 dollars on a phone, then you're used to seeing
specs like octa core processors, four gigabytes of RAM,
64 gigabytes of storage,
just really top tier stuff that's gonna run great.
But there are a lot of huge markets, like India,
where people can only afford much, much cheaper phones.
We're talking 100 dollars or so.
And in those markets, Android doesn't work so well.
It can be sluggish and unresponsive.
Now, Google is trying to fix
that 100 dollar phone experience
with something called Android Go,
technically Android Oreo (Go Edition),
but that's a mouthfull.
It's a new, stripped down version of Android
that's supposed to make the operating system
run better on phones without a
lot of processing power and RAM.
Here's how it works.
First, even though Android Go
looks just like normal Android,
it's been optimized to work for phones
that have one gigabyte of RAM or less.
It's actually the first time the Google Assistant
has been able to run on hardware this basic,
which is an important addition.
Now, I've been testing these phones for the past few days,
and they don't run as smooth as a Pixel,
but that's not the point.
They still run pretty well,
and in the past, phones this cheap have
had trouble just opening apps.
The real question though is how they're
gonna perform a year from now,
and right now, that's just impossible to say.
The second big change we can see much more clearly.
Android, and Android's apps, now take up way less space.
The default install size is a little over three gigs,
that's as opposed to five or six gigabytes beforehand,
which is a huge savings, especially considering
theses phones likely had eight
gigabytes of storage to begin with.
A lot of that storage savings comes from apps.
Google has replaced all of Android's
default apps with Go Edition apps
such as Maps Go, Gmail Go, Google Go.
They're just like the normal version of the apps
for the most part, but Google stripped away
extraneous features that it thinks won't
be that useful in these markets.
And, in doing so, they were able to
bring the size of them way down.
If you do have Go Edition phone,
it's not like you're limited from
getting the normal versions of these apps either.
You can still go and download the
full Gmail if you want it,
it's just gonna take up more space.
These apps also help you save on mobile data.
One of the big ones is YouTube Go.
It lets you download videos for offline viewing,
and it will tell you exactly how much data
you're going to use when you go to stream a video.
That's a huge help if you're in a country
with a very limited and expensive data plan.
(moves to brass hats)
Here at Mobile World Congress, Google introduced
the first six Android Go phones.
It's expecting a lot more in the future.
So far, my favorite is the Nokia One,
which has these colorful, interchangeable back shells.
It's not the nicest phone in the world,
but it has a decent screen, and a nice design,
and compared to some of the other options,
that's definitely a stand out.
Ultimately, performance still comes
down to the hardware manufacturer,
and how much extra software they choose
to bog down the phone with.
Android Go isn't a silver bullet for all
the problems with low-end Android phones.
Most Android Go phones will be in
the 50 to 130 dollar range.
They'll be sold everywhere, including in the U.S.,
but Google is really targeting markets
where people are buying their first smart phones,
and even a 200 dollar phone is seen as a luxury.
Android Go needs to run well enough
to convince people to not go and buy another feature phone.
If all of this sounds familiar,
it's probably because you're thinking of Android One.
That was a similar program Google
started a few years back to help manufacturers
make good, cheap Android phones,
but the program kinda died off,
and it's since been revamped as
a stock android program, which is cool,
but not at all what the program started out as.
Google seems to have learned from that failure.
Instead of approaching things from the hardware side,
it's now going in through software.
And, after all, software is Google's strong suit.
Android Go isn't going to fix cheap
smart phones overnight, or even this year.
But it does seem to be moving
Android in the right direction.
Now, Google just has to convince consumers
that Android Go is a good thing to have on their phone.
Hey, thanks for watching this video
in surprisingly frozen Barcelona.
It's been wonderful.
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