Android 10 and its Specific Features

Android 10 and its Specific Features

Android 10 is here! 

Android 10 is an operating system updates that, like all Android updates.

If you have an Android phone, you'll be familiar with the update process for Android versions: Google launches a beta, eventually pushing that to Pixel devices, before manufacturers roll-out to other devices about 6 months later.

The Android 10 beta was announced on 13 March 2019 and the final release began to roll out from 3 September to Pixel phones. Thanks to both Google and beta testers in the beta phase, we know nearly every new feature included in Android 10. There's a system-wide dark mode, a Bubbles multitasking feature, foldables  and 5G.At the same time, with almost 50 changes related to privacy and security, Android 10 gives you greater protection, transparency, and control over your data.

Other generations of Android had names like "Nougat," "Oreo," and "Pie," but those alphabetized dessert-themed days are gone now, like so many sweet Thanksgiving scraps tossed into the garbage.

Dark mode

Android 10 now boasts a dark mode, which Google calls Dark Theme. Besides giving your phone a brooding black-hued look, dark mode can stretch a phone’s battery life. That’s because on an OLED screen, the individual pixels can actually shut off. When dark mode is on and parts of the screen are pure black, that means that pixels are off, and the battery is doing less work.

And Google notes that you'll be able to customize Dark Theme so it's not either totally on or off: "You can enable Dark Theme for your entire phone or for specific apps like Photos and Calendar," according this recent Post from Google.

5G

You’re probably hearing a lot about the promises of 5G, which is the faster, next-gen cellular network that’s slowly arriving. This next version of Android “supports 5G natively,” Stephanie Cuthbertson, director of product management for Android, noted back at the I/O event in May.

Remember, besides the software running on the phone, the smartphone itself also has to have the right internal equipment to be able to pick up a 5G signal where it exists. Right now, one of the most prominent 5G-enabled phones is the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G.

Folding phone support

Android 10 has also been designed to work well with phones that fold, like the Samsung Galaxy Fold. This new version of Android will support handsets that fold through features like “screen continuity”—in other words, if you’re using an app on the front screen of a folding phone, and then you open the device to the tablet-sized screen, that app will then port itself over to the bigger internal screen.

Live Caption

Do you turn on the subtitles on Game of Thrones and other shows to help you understand what characters are mumbling about? Google offers a new captioning option that takes the words spoken in a video and displays them as captions in real time. This is a separate capability from what Netflix offers in their app, for example—it's a way for you to see captions in a video you've taken on your phone, or that someone has sent you.

In fact, Google said in a blog item that the feature "works with videos, podcasts and audio messages, across any app—even stuff you record yourself."

The feature could be helpful for a person who is hard of hearing or deaf. Google has moved the artificial intelligence network that powers captioning to the phone itself rather than the cloud, so that it doesn’t need to be connected to the internet to work. That AI takes the form of a neural network that occupies just 80 megabytes of space on your smartphone; the fact that this machine learning magic happens on the device is good from a privacy perspective.

While Android 10 is indeed out, Live Caption is coming to Pixel phones "this fall," according to the September Android 10 blog post.

Gestures

The new gesture system — which is optional — replaces all the buttons at the bottom with a single white bar, just like the iPhone. Also like the iPhone, you can swipe up to go home, swipe in a kind of a hook move to get into an overview screen, and swipe straight across to quickly switch between apps. Unlike iOS, Android uses an app drawer. To access that, you swipe up from the bottom when on the home screen.

Those gestures miss the most important (and, surprisingly enough, the most-used) button on Android: back. Google’s solution is to make the entire left and right sides of the screen dedicated to going back when you swipe in from the edge.

Lastly, Google Assistant also has a new gesture: swiping in diagonally from either of the

bottom corners. On the home screen, two little curved lines sometimes appear to remind you that extra gesture exists.

So:

• Swipe from the bottom: go home or go to the overview screen
• Swipe up from the bottom on the home screen: open the app drawer
• Swipe across the bottom: switch apps
• Swipe from either side: go back
• Swipe diagonally up from the bottom corners: Google Assistant
• Swipe down from the top: open Quick Settings and notifications

This all seems very complicated because it is very complicated. It’s a lot to keep in your head. But after you use Android 10 for a few minutes, it all feels intuitive and fluid. The animations aren’t quite as nice as they are on an iPhone, but not so much that it’s ever truly bothered me.

“BACK” IS USED MORE THAN “HOME,” SO GOOGLE DEDICATED BOTH SIDES OF THE SCREEN TO THE BACK GESTURE

All that is well and good, but in the Android world, it’s caused quite a stir.

Focus mode

Do you ever find it's hard to resist clicking on an app—Twitter or Facebook, perhaps—when you really should be using your phone for something else? You'll be able to check off the apps you want silenced, so you won't receive notifications from them, and you'll also see a pop-up message letting you know that you paused that app if you indeed give into Instagram temptation and click on one of the temporarily forbidden applications.