Gadgetory

google i/o is here and that means we finally know what's happening with Android P company's focusing on three things a simpler interface and intelligent interface and this thing they're calling digital well being what's that all about so the new Android P beta should be available pretty much right away on a whole bunch of devices like seven or nine devices it's on the Google pixel to excel which I have here you can also get on a one plus six Nokia phones etc etc anyway I want to show you the most obvious thing you're gonna see on this beta of Android P because oh my god they took the home button away so what you do is you give it a little swipe up and that takes you to the overview screen all of your apps are listed horizontally here and you there even live so you can like long press on something and have it do a search for that thing or copy the text or whatever which is kind of cool if you give it a longer swipe up or a second swipe up it takes you to all of your apps and it lists your most used apps or sorry the like AI detected app so what they think you're gonna want to use right there at the top and that's also in this half swipe up down here at the bottom which is pretty good there's a little tab also for your work apps and if you really want to you just turn those damn things off because it wants work apps one last little clever thing with that button if you just slide it over to the right you can get to that list of your most recent apps to jump into them so it's a really quick way to switch between apps and then of course when you're in an app the home button is there to go home you can just tap it to go home and the good old back bug is there too if you want the back button notifications things are basically the same but there are some really nice updates so if you start dismissing stuff a bunch eventually it'll ask if you just want to stop seeing those notifications you can long press on a notification instead of remembering that weird little swipe over to get the settings and then there's just a plain old manage notifications button at the bottom when you tap on that it takes you to a list of your most recent notifications and then you can just turn those things off because they've been annoying me lately so it's a much faster way to handle notifications now this is just some of the stuff in Android P there's a lot more there's all the stuff about digital well being there's a bunch of AI stuff and so I want to talk about that stuff now now because this is Google because Google can't string more than five words together without saying the words AI we're talking about AI again AI is built into Android in a few different ways there's a new machine learning kit so that you can make your own intelligent apps and that works on both Android and iOS actually but in Android itself AI is gonna watch what apps you use and then shut them down intelligently to save battery life it's also gonna adjust your brightness automatically for you I don't know saying that that's AI feels a little bit buzzed wordy and a little bit overkill but it should hopefully give you better battery life in the end what are some of the things that are more intelligent and happening on the phone right and so I mean is the whole premise of this is you know we think smart gold smart phones but you know what they could be a lot smaller and it could be a lot more intelligent and and you know what does that mean well in our case it's really we think the phone should adapt to you one area that we've worked on which I like a lot is what we call adaptive battery it's a project we did with deep mind it uses on device machine learning to figure out which apps you're gonna launch next and which ones you're not gonna launch for a couple of hours which you may not do till evening we've got all that's one example another is auto brightness now you know pretty much every modern smartphone today we'll look at the it has a light sensor and it'll adjust the brightness depending on the light but it doesn't take into account your per your preferences right or or your environment and so what we've done it'll actually learn how you move the brightness given different lighting conditions and then it will do it for you so one of the things that Google is doing in Android P is they're introducing these new terms there's a slice and there's an action and they're basically deep links which means that an app has got something you want to do deep down inside the app but you want to do it somewhere else in the operating system so if you do a search for lift it just surfaces a link to just go home and it jumps right into the app to do that or if you want if you are opening up your app drawer there's a couple little things inside the app door at the top that lets you jump right into some action you do all the time like you know call your significant other or open up seamless when you get home because let's be honest you're gonna open up seamless when you get home you're lazy as hell those are all the whiz-bang features are gonna make you more productive with your phone and use your phone more and they're all great but Google's doing this whole other thing that's designed to get you to use your phone less digital well being for us theme is a set of capabilities we're putting into Android to help people become more aware of how they're using their device and then be in control have a set of controls where they can decide how they want to change that baby so one of the ways you're doing that is you have this thing is it anybody call the dashboard yeah there's a dashboard is it just it's just a lot more checkboxes for people to have to look at like are you finding that people are actually finding value in this thing the first step is awareness and that dashboard is pretty straightforward it shows you how much time you spent on your phone each day what apps you spent that time in how many times you unlock your phone how many notifications you've received and then unless you drill down on those things and then the next piece of it is okay so how can the software help me if I want to change but my behavior and so that's where we have we're putting a bunch of capabilities we're calling you know user controls so you can set a time limit on the amount of time you want to spend in an app and so I could say for example I only want to spend 30 minutes a day in YouTube or an Instagram or my favorite game maybe subway surfer right and another situation that we find people really talk to us a lot about was trying to be fully present for something and the phone perhaps not helping with the hat so do not disturb being improved where I can like turn on do not disturb now all the visual interruptions go away so it doesn't show notifications on lock screens it's done not only does not vibrate doesn't know vibrations you know basically no interruptions so after that really brief look at Android PE what do I think well I'm kind of hopeful I really love the idea of exploding apps out into the rest of the phones so that you can just do a search and jump right to the thing you want to do and I'm really intrigued by the idea of using apps less because I don't know I use Twitter way too much if you take those two ideas together what's really interesting is Google's trying to set up a system where you think about your phone less both because it does stuff for you automatically through AI and because you just use your phone list and maybe we could all stand to do that but even though I'm hopeful that doesn't mean I'm naive Android has a huge update problem it always has and the theory is that this new treble system they developed is going to on more phones sooner we're making a good step here it's gonna show up on like seven manufacturers in beta right away and we should have it on a bunch of phones not just pixel phones by the end of the year but Google has to execute because every year we see a great new version of Android and then we'd have to wait to get it on the phones that everybody buys Samsung phones I would really like to see them fix that this year with Android P thank you so much for watching if you like this video there's another video over at Virg science you should definitely watch it's about pie charts and are they actually useful for helping you see if revisions any good why they're always all the same you should go check it out