Gadgetory

if you're used to spending six seven eight hundred dollars on a phone they're using specs like octa-core processor is four gigabytes of RAM 64 gigabytes of storage just really top to your stuff that's gonna run great for there are live huge markets like India where people can only afford much much cheaper phones we're talking $100 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 hundred-dollar phone experience with something called Android Go technically Android oreo go Edition but that's a mouthful it's a new stripped-down version of Android they're supposed to make the operating system run better on phones without a lot of processing power and ramp here's how it works first even though Android Go looks just like normal Android it's been optimized to work phones that have one gigabyte of RAM or less this is actually the first time the Google assistant has been able to run on hardware just basic which is an important addition now I've been testing these bones in 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 apps now take up way less space the default install size is a little over three gigs that's as opposed to 5 or 6 to go bytes a forehand which is a huge savings especially considering these phones like we had 8 gigabytes of storage to begin with a lot of that storage saving comes from apps Google has replaced all of androids default apps with go edition apps says Maps go Gmail go Google go there just like the normal version of the apps in the most part but Google is stripped away extraneous features that it thinks won't be that useful in these markets and in doing so they know they will bring the size of them way down if you do have a 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'll tell you exactly how much data you're use when you go to stream of video that's a huge help if you're in a country with a very limited and expensive data plan 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 standout ultimately performance still comes down to the hardware manufacturer and how much extra software they choose to bog down the phone with Android goat 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 though we sold everywhere including in the US but Google is really targeting markets where people are buying their first smart phones and even a $200 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 this sounds familiar it's probably because you're thinking of Android 1 that was a similar program Google started a few years back to help manufacturers make good cheap Android phones but the program kind of 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 goat isn't going to fix cheap smartphones overnight or even this year but it does seem to be moving Android in the right direction now Google just has to convince consumers the Android Go is a good thing to have on their phone hey thanks for watching this video in surprisingly frozen Barcelona been wonderful please subscribe at youtube.com slash diverge visit the verge com we've got more there