Gadgetory

this is the Nexus 6 and this is Android 6.0 marshmallow it's a whole new operating system from Google and it's coming to your Android phone eventually this year's update to Android includes a whole lot of little things and one potentially huge thing it's called now on tap and it basically lets any app ask Google anything from anywhere automatically it's a little bit like every single app on your phone just got a Google now superpower to use now on tap you just hold down the home button inside any app Android then read your phone screen and searches for stuff that might be related if you're in a chat and talking about dinner in a movie you'll get movie times and a link to the Yelp app to check out restaurant reviews if you're reading an article about lovely human being Billy Zane you'll get a card showing a link to his IMDB profile if there's a phone number or an address on your screen you'll be able to call or navigate without having to copy/paste from one app to another it's a really great idea and it should save you a ton of time on your phone but should is the operative word because in my testing now on tap just doesn't seem to be smart enough this is my friend Ross Miller on the screen he and I have been emailing and texting me and calling each other for years so you'd think that when I hit now on tap it would know who he is and give me his contact card but nope that is definitely a different Ross Miller and that's the thing about now on tap right now it should be great but it's actually a little bit frustrating it's a little bit like the early days of Siri when she got more wrong than she did right and you just kind of learn to stop using her now Google can fix all of these problems and hopefully it will eventually but for right now it's just kind of a crapshoot then there's other little things in Android marshmallow and every single one of them is a nice improvement it starts with a Google now launcher which has a smarter app drawer that gives you a press right up at the top super fast scrolling to any letter or you can quickly search by holding down the app drawer button the new kind of cartoony Google logo is a little cartoony but otherwise the design here is a nice subtle evolution from what we had before the next biggest change is battery life and no you're not going to magically get way way more but you are going to see some improvements there's a new thing called doze that shuts apps down when you're or tablet is just sitting on a table it helps keep it alive when you pick it up hours or even days later androids also being way more helpful at managing apps they only ask for permissions when they need them now and the OS is also just doing a better job in general of keeping the weird ones in check when you're not using them little things like that are all over the place in marshmallow my favorite new one is the share sheet which puts the people you send stuff to above all of the apps the volume sliders make more sense now and Do Not Disturb has been shuffled to a way less annoying place oh and the cut copy paste buttons are way better to Google basically decided to just do it the way the iPhone has always done it and that's marshmallow in a nutshell it's not a huge change it's just a little bit smarter and it's softened a lot of androids rough edges it's good but I do wish that now on tap where as mind-blowing as Google had kind of hinted that it would be back when it first announced it and since most of the best features are under the hood you're not really going to notice them until developers start using them but really all of these features just plain aren't going to hit your Android phone anytime soon the funny thing about reviewing a new version of Android is that you know that so few people are actually going to be able to use it in the next six to eight months it's actually kind of depressing we're seven years into the lifecycle this OS and Google still hasn't figured out how to keep every Android phone updated and reliable or a timely way but don't stress out if you can't install right now even though marshmallow is Android 6.0 for an end user it feels more like 5.3 I like it but if I'm being honest I have to admit that I was hoping for some more