Android

Three things I’m excited about in Android M

With all the attention the ZenFone 2 has been getting, I almost missed the announcement of Android M in last week’s Google IO. The latest version of Android focuses on improving the core user experience of Android, fixing thousands of bugs, to making some big changes to the fundamentals of the platform.

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Google has made numerous improvements and added more features to the latest Android version. I listed the three features I’m excited about in Android M.

  • Battery – Who wouldn’t like more battery life? Nowadays, smartphones give you a day or two of power. Google has been busy looking for ways to improve it. They started with Project Volta in Lollipop. In Android M, they will introduce a new power management feature called Doze. Here, Android will use significant motion detection to learn if a device has been left unattended for a while. In this state, Android will exponentially back off background activity, trading off a little bit of app freshness for longer battery life. 
  • Now on Tap – Not everyone will appreciate this, but I use Google Now. And this makes it a bit more interesting. With Now on Tap, you can get assistance from Now even if you’re in another app. For example, you and a friend are texting about a movie. By pressing the home button, Google Now can use the context of your text to find out information about the movie.
  • Native SD card support – In M, Android will natively treat SD cards as internal storage. This means we can move any installed app and its data to the SD card. It will be baked into Android, as oppose to OEMs coding it in. This is good news for future low and mid range handsets running M with meager 4GB or 8GB of internal storage. This might be sad news for phones without SD cards (Yes, I’m looking at you Galaxy S6. At the moment though, I’m quite satisfied with 32GB of storage).

That’s it for now. There are more, but these features are what I am most excited about. If you guys have other features you like, please share it with the rest of us in the comments section.

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Bryan is a geek at heart and a tech enthusiast by choice. He has a strong background in corporate communications, marketing services, and customer relations having worked in the telecommunications and banking sectors for over two decades. In his spare time, he enjoys watching clips on YouTube and binge watching shows on Netflix.

2 Comments

  1. TechnoBaboy Reply

    Pwede. The Android logo is a few sweets removed from looking like a marshmallow anyway..

  2. Volts Sanchez Reply

    i wish my G2 could skip Lollipop and go straight to M (Marshmallow?).

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