Google unveiled Android 5.0 Lollipop
Android L, or its official title, Android Lollipop, is here, and it's brought a raft of new changes, with Sundar Pichai, head of Android, proclaiming it to be one of the biggest upgrades to Android yet.
For the rest of the folk in the world Google has said it will be available for the Nexus 4, 5, 7, 10 and Google Play edition devices 'in the coming weeks' - so some users should be seeing it show up come November, if not before.
Motorola has also confirmed that Android Lollipop will be hitting the Moto X at some point and OnePlus has committed to bringing it to the OnePlus One within three months of Google releasing a final build.
If you're wondering about how much this update will cost the good news is Android 5.0, like all previous updates, is free.
Material Design
The big news for Android Lollipop is the change to the way it looks - and it's going well beyond the mobile phone to the tablet, TV screen, watch and even the car.
The new Material Design is strange in that it bucks a trend at the moment - yes, it's flat, but it's heavily based on making every animation, every ripple, every shadow look real, which is something that most brands are shying away from.
The Roboto font has been updated too, so everything from watch to TV to mobile looks the same.
Every animation on screen will be allowed to connect to one another - so there's no 'teleportation between apps'. The home, back and multi-tasking window buttons on Android 5.0 have been refined too, and overall, this is a massive step forward for a cleaner, more intuitive-looking version of Google's mobile platform.
Notifications and Lock Screen
Notifications on Android Lollipop are getting an overhaul, so only the more relevant information about your apps is being presented.
You can even adjust the OS to display notifications from the most important people and apps during the evening hours or an important meeting. The notification panel is being merged with the lockscreen so you can see what's going on as you pick up the phone, and a simple swipe up takes you into the phone.
Another big change is that notifications will flow over the screen at the top - get a call when you're playing a game and it will pop up at the top, asking if you want to take it. This will likely be the same with messages etc too, meaning less intrusion at the wrong times.
The lockscreen on Android 5.0 is getting smarter as well - if you've got a specific location set up, or are wearing a Bluetooth device, the phone will recognise you and unlock without a PIN.
Move away or take your watch off and you'll need to tap or swipe in a code when you unlock - or you can even use your voice.
Interlocking Apps
Google wants your apps to be able to talk to one another on Android 5.0 - it used the example of searching for a place, only to have it served up in Google Earth, which is where it originally was being looked at.
The idea goes much deeper than that though - Chrome browsing has an API that other apps can take advantage of, so if you click a link to book a table in the browser you'll be taken to something like OpenTable directly, rather than the mobile site.
This feature depends a lot on app developers taking advantage of the new tools, but all the onboard Google apps will be much more dependent on one another.
More Efficient
Whilst Android 5.0 comes with some nifty new features that make an immediate visual impact, Google has put a lot of work in behind the scenes to ensure that Android Lollipop is the fastest yet.
If you're interested, here are the finer details: ART, an optional runtime in Android KitKat, has now been made the standard for Android Lollipop and works with ARM, x86 and MIPS platforms and runs twice as fast as the Dalvik runtime that is found on previous Android iterations.
The biggest benefit is that all apps will benefit from ART right away, without the need for them to be updated. ART is also more memory efficient than Dalvik, meaning that apps that are running in the background will benefit from megabytes of saved data.
ART is also 64-bit compatible allowing Android Lollipop to benefit from the larger number registers, cross platform support and the increased RAM support that 64-bit architecture allows for. That 64-bit support is being kicked in to gear now too, as the latest developer build is 64-bit.
Battery Life
Batteries on phones running Android Lollipop are going to become more efficient with Project Volta, Google's new way of showing why and how a phone's power pack is juicing down.
It opens up the battery use to developers so they can see what's ruining the experience, which should in turn help plug the gaps in power leakage.
Battery Saver mode is integrated by default too, which can lengthen your use during the day by up to 90 minutes.
Even without Battery Saver mode Android 5.0 could do wonders for battery life. ArsTechnica put the new OS version to the test and found that a Nexus 5 running Android Lollipop had around 36% more battery life than one on Android 4.4 KitKat.
Google unveiled Android 5.0 Lollipop
Reviewed by Salman
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Reviewed by Salman
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