![]() It makes some significant changes under the hood that provide benefits including longer battery life. Overall Android 7.0 Nougat is a great update. In fact, the onlytimes it didn’t recognise my face were when I was wearing sunglasses and overly large headphones. Using a Pixel C, the system went from slightly useful in the odd occasion when it worked to unlocking the device about 80% of the time. They use a combination of sensors to know when to deactivate the screen lock and when to make sure the passcode is always required.įacial recognition has been available for a while, but the trusted face system has significantly improved since Android 6.0 Marshmallow, which is particularly useful for tablets and other devices without a fingerprint scanner. Google’s smart lock features have been around for a while. Nougat improves Android’s smartlock feature, making face matching significantly faster and more accurate. The result is between 15 and 20% longer battery life in my testing on a Nexus 6P. When the screen is off, Nougat has much tighter controls on what can and can’t access data, how frequently and how often it wakes the phone up. It made a big difference to standby battery life.Īndroid 7.0 Nougat applies the same battery-extending features to when the phone is moving too. One of the best bits about Android 6.0 Marshmallow was the introduction of Doze, a feature that helped save battery when the phone or tablet wasn’t moving, such as being placed on a desk. Other devices, including the OnePlus 3 have had this feature for a while, but it’s good to see it baked into Android. Copy text or links between apps is now rapid. Double tap overview to switch to most recent appĭouble-tapping the overview button will also switch straight to the last-used app, which makes bouncing between two apps a lot faster. It’s less useful for smartphones, although landscape multi-window on large-screen phablets can be useful in situations where you need to keep an eye on two things simultaneously, such as a map and a conversation. It’s a feature that should have been there for a long time for Android tablets and makes them more productive as work machines. Only a very small minority of apps actively block it, and those might be updated in the near future to support multi-window. It works really well, with almost every app supporting it. Portrait multi-window mode on a smartphone isn’t very useful, but landscape split-screen can be useful on larger devices. Pressing and holding the overview button, which shows as two halves when active, will cancel multi-window too. Users can drag the black bar in the middle to change the size of the split, or remove it altogether. Once in split-screen mode, Nougat behaves similarly to Windows and iOS. You can also do it from the recently used apps list by taping and holding one of the apps in the list and dragging to the top of the screen or the left or right-hand sides if in landscape, allowing you to pick the other app from the list.Ī hidden method activated in the System UI Tuner works by swiping up on the screen from the overview button. Pressing and holding the so-called overview button with one app on screen invokes the recently used apps list in a split-screen view to select a second app to put on screen. Multi-window, or side-by-side split screen support, is the other big new functional addition. Multi-window makes Android tablets more useful for productivity and can be used either in landscape or portrait. Users can hit reply from the notification and type their message directly into the box under the notification, which will also show a small snippet of the history of the conversation if you haven’t opened the app since the last reply. Google’s apps such as Messenger and Hangouts have had quick reply features for a while but now basically every communications app should have the feature. The biggest functional change for notifications, however, is the wider roll out of quick reply functions. Multiple notifications from the same app also cluster together, which cleans up the notification shade and makes it easier to see what’s what at a glance and dismiss en masse. ![]() They’re now flatter and wider, filling the entire width of the screen on a smartphone, and joined directly to each other, which wastes less space than Marshmallow’s card-like appearance. Most of the work has gone on behind the scenes but the one obvious change in Nougat is to notifications. ![]() Nougat makes quick replies default for almost all communication-based notifications. ![]()
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