Android L Hands On Impressions

Image Credit: www.android.com

(Disclaimer: We do not encourage the installation of Developer Previews or any beta software on your main device. Pre-release software is often incomplete and sometimes unstable. It may harm your devices, or cause them to not work properly. These releases are for developers, do not install unless you understand the repercussions.)

With that out of the way...

It's already been a couple of weeks, I've been using android L as my daily driver both on my Nexus 5 and my Nexus 7. I'll be covering my time with Android L, starting with what you can see and moving on to the invisible changes.

Visual Changes

Visuals changes in L are few but significant, seeing as developers are still working on prepping their applications for the fall debut of the next version of Android. Tweaks are found mainly on integrated Android applications (ie. Dialer, Calculator, Notification Shade). The changes have been made to the navigation bar (from the traditional home button, recent windows and back arrow) to a much cleaner set of buttons pictured below. 

As you can see this is a significant departure from the buttons that have been with us since as long ago as Honeycomb (3.2), they still complete the same function, albeit some in different ways. Recents for example was a list with thumbnails, and now is a full preview of the application (below). The Home and Back buttons keep their same behaviors and you can still pull up Google Now from the nav bar as well.

Recents is now like a systemwide list of Chrome tabs, where each card is a running app. During the keynote it was addressed that with Android L, each chrome tab would behave as a separate card so as to be able to jump between tasks more comfortably. This functionality has yet to be added to chrome so for now all you can see is apps.

For all intents and purposes, the home screen has remained the same. As you can see in the above screenshot of my Nexus 7, little has changed so far. The Notification shade (pictured below) has adopted Material Design in quite an elegant way, your notifications (ongoing or otherwise) collapse as you pull it down a second time to access your quick toggle options. The icons on these options will toggle them on or off, the text underneath the icon will open the settings for that icon. The settings button on the top right, will take you to general settings, and tapping your g+ avatar will open your contact card, but tapping the battery doesn't do anything. 

I never use the dialer app on my phone. I seldom use the voice calling features on my phone at all. I have to hand it to Google though, for the first time in a long time, receiving a call is not an affair I am completely disappointed with. The dialer app is clean and as colorful as you'd expect but it's not about that, the previous dialer app had all the same features. The difference here as with the rest of the operating system (thus far) is not in how it looks but the change in how it works. Through out the dialer app you are eased around, recents, speed dial (favorites), and the contact list. While you are in all three of these options you always have a small floating button granting you access to the keypad. 

With that same ease, you transition between applications, with each behaving as a card that is pulled down from the bottom edge of the screen when you go to the home screen or pulled up when you open an app. The way that you move around Android has definitely changed and it's become significantly more graceful. 

Under The Hood Changes

Project Volta is in full swing here,the battery life on my phone is significantly better now than it was under KitKat (4.4.4), I can go almost a day and a half of regular use without charging. I find it interesting that I am conditioned to plug in my phone as soon as it tells me that it is low on juice, I have wrestled with myself multiple times to not do this and let it go on without getting plugged in. I'm very impressed with what Google has done in terms of power management. Battery saver mode does it's job and does it well, letting you squeeze an extra hour of life from your phone, reducing performance which is the only time you will see the phone actually stutter. Performance has been really speedy and smooth, the aforementioned transitions have created no issue in the way of slowing down the phone. 

Wrap-up

I have been very pleasantly surprised with this developer preview, and look forward to playing with the final product. I can't wait until all of the applications have the same delightful presence as the dialer, and using my phone is just one continuous transition through cards and content. Until then we'll have to give them time to polish things up and iron out bugs.