On Wednesday, Google opened its I/O developers conference with a keynote by CEO Sundar Pichai and his team. The nearly 2-hour long address encapsulated what the company has been striving to achieve from artificial intelligence to VR and Android O, its next major OS. Apart from announcing the beta rollout for Android O, Google also mentioned some additional features that will come with the new OS, which includes a more fluid experience with faster reboot and app startup.
Android O is touted to be a lot faster than the previous generation. Of course, that's what one expects with any new software update. Google claims, for example, that the Pixel will reboot twice as fast on Android O as compared to Android Nougat. The company is also adding optimisations for developers to help prevent your battery from draining.
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Google spoke about Android optimisation that will not only help reduce battery consumption but will also load apps faster and improve app performance in general. As an example, Google explained that Google Sheets will complete a set of typical operations twice as quickly. Google didn't explain exactly how it's going about its optimisation, but we do know that it's getting some help from Android Vitals, which focuses on optimising battery life, startup time, graphic rendering time, and stability.
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Apart from this, Google highlighted some additional features that will be coming with Android O such as Smart Text Selection, which improves copy and paste through the help of machine learning and Notification Dots for developers to notify users about about activity on the app, driving engagement, among other things.
Faster load times is always a good news and Android users will appreciate these subtle tweaks under the hood if it helps save on time and battery. For those wondering about the same for entry-level phones, Google has them covered as well with the announcement of Android Go, which is a version of the mobile operating system that has been optimised for smartphones with 1GB or less RAM.
We discussed everything that was announced at Google I/O 2017 on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast. You can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts or RSS, or just hit the play button below to listen to this episode.
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