It’s official, the next Android operating system will be called Oreo. The search giant revealed the name at the height of solar eclipse in New York during an eclipse viewing party. The all-new Android 8.0 Oreo will be hitting Google Pixel, Pixel XL, Nexus 6P, Nexus 5X and Pixel C devices in the next few weeks. David Burke, the VP of engineering, Android, has said that the OS version for Pixel and Nexus smartphones has entered carrier testing. Beta users can flash the final version of the OS manually. Wonder what’s new in Android Oreo? Here are the key new features that your smartphones will get with Android 8.0 Oreo update.
As is always the case, Google has teased Android 8.0’s official name for months, only referring to it as Android O.
Each different version of Android is named after a sweet treat, and Oreo was always the most likely choice here. Other suggestions included Oatmeal Cookie and even Orangina, which just don’t roll off the tongue quite as well.
Oreo follows Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean, KitKat, Lollipop, Marshmallow and Nougat.
New features
One of the key improvements Google has made with Android Oreo concerns battery life. The software limits the activity of apps running in the background, focusing on location updates, broadcasts and background services, which should help your phone last longer.
Google has also redesigned Android’s unusual emoji, and introduced over 60 new ones.
Oreo will help your phone power up faster too, and should make it easier for you to handle lots of notifications from lots of apps.
It introduces a snooze function, which could come in handy for meetings and general peace of mind, and allows you to prioritise certain alerts over others, and app icons now come with notification dots, to show you if there’s anything in there, like a new message or email, that you haven’t yet checked.
You can also group notifications by channel, which lets you neatly bundle certain alerts together depending on subject matter.
Picture-in-picture mode is likely to prove hugely popular, particularly amongst YouTube and Netflix fans. It allows you to continue watching clips while using another app without having to hit pause, with a shrunken video window appearing on top of something else, like Gmail or Maps.
‘Copyless’ pasting, where your phone guesses what text you want to copy in one app and makes it available to paste in another, is another handy addition. For instance, if you’re looking at a restaurant in Chrome and then open Maps, your keyboard will suggest the restaurant’s address.
Google is also bringing better audio to Android, by adding new audio codecs to improve the sound quality of music played through wireless speakers and headphones.
What it doesn’t bring with it are any really significant design changes, but Google’s allowed developers to experiment with different shapes for app icons, which opens the door for more variety.
Google’s VP of Engineering Dave Burke, who penned the announcement, said that Google worked with various hardware makers, including Essential, Huawei, HTC, Kyocera, Motorola, HMD Global Home of Nokia Phones, Samsung, Sharp, and Sony on Android Oreo upgrades and new releases. These companies are supposed to launch Oreo devices or upgrade existing ones by the end of the year.
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