Everything You Need To Know About Google’s New Android L
Google is going for a serious upgrade of Android. They are calling it the “Android L”. Google has released Developer’s review for a hands on experience for interested developers. This release is for Nexus 5 and the details and impressions are described below
What’s New
Google have made lots of little changes in the UI. The most obvious one is geometrical buttons on the bottom. The shapes of these buttons are related to the tasks they do. The triangular button looks like a back button and it is. The circle button is for opening app drawer and it resembles the circle above it, and the square is for opening the multitasking menu of Android.
Another major change is the notification bar. You can open the notification bar and swipe off notifations or open them even when the phone is locked. Of course it will ask you for the password. Also, big popups of notifications can appear on the screen inside some of the apps.
The most noticable change is the theme. The holo theme of the Android Kit Kat is replaced with a theme inspired with basic shapes and things like sheets of paper. Google calls this new style “Material design”.
Improved Multitasking
The multitasking menu has been given an all new and impressive look. The open apps are stacked over one another. To close the apps, you can either press the cross button on the top right corner, or you can swipe it off the screen.
All New and Colorful
All the default apps look colorful and intuitive. The dialer for instance, has bright and colorful blocks and have impressive animations. The calculator is also very less boring now. All the things seem more 3D and immersive. The point of all this is to make it as real as possible. The buttons are also made very soft.
For people having visual impairment or color blindness, there is a very good feature. The colors can be inverted on screen for people having less visibility, and for people having color blindness, there are different space correction modes that are shown in the screenshots below.
Other Interesting Features
One interesting and useful feature is battery saver. Obviously as the name suggests, it saves battery. It can help you save upto 90 minutes of battery. As shown in screenshots below, it plots the consumption of battery with respect to time. You can select the battery level at which you want to turn on the battery saver.
The Do Not Disturb feature, which was already on the release of iOS 7, is now on Android L and is better than ever. The scheduling is now easy and flexible. You can enable showing of notifications during this mode. But the best feature introduced in this mode is custom blocking of contacts. You can select the contacts whose calls and message are allowed to come through while the mode is on.
Download Android L release on your Nexus here.