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Hands-on with Android P—Is this the beginning of a new design language?
The Galaxy S9 versus the Galaxy S8 — is it worth the upgrade?
Essential really wants to solve the screen notch problem

Hands-on with Android P—Is this the beginning of a new design language?

Posted: 09 Mar 2018 09:40 AM PST

Android P Developer Preview is out this week, and the whole Android community is combing through it looking for changes. When Android P is released later this year, it will bring an all-new notification panel, new settings, official notch support, and a ton of other tiny changes.

We already did a rundown of the features announced in Google's blog post, but now we've actually gotten to spend some time with the next major version of Android, so we're here to report back. What follows are some of the more interesting things we discovered.

Material Design 2?

Rounded rectangles are everywhere in Android P, like here on the notification panel and lock screen notifications.
Dialog boxes get rounded rectangles, too.
Same for the volume and power menus.
In the Google feed, type something into the search box, and the right image shows google search results. Everything lives in a white, rounded rectangle.
The new Google Pay app. Again, everything is a rounded rectangle.
The horizontal app transition.
Notifications expand to fill the screen.

In the lead up to the release of Android P, there were numerous rumblings that big design changes were coming from Google. A February report from Bloomberg said Android P would feature a "dramatic redesign" of the OS, and as more and more parts of Android P trickle out, this report is looking more plausible. Android P brings big changes to the notification panel, ambient display, and settings, along with lots of home screen tweaks. Outside of Android P, there's a continual drip of redesigned apps arriving through the Play Store that seem to slot nicely into this new design. By the time the September-ish launch rolls around, we could be looking at a software package from Google that looks nothing like the Android of last year.

The main motif we can pick out of this new design is "white and round." All over Android P we see white backgrounds with rounded corners and icons, which look distinctly different from Google's current "Material Design" design language. The most obvious implementation is the all-new notification panel, but this also extends to the power and volume menus, all the dialog boxes, and little things like the rounded search bar in settings. Outside of Android P, the Google app seems to fit nicely into this design, too, with rounded rectangles used for the news feed, search box, and even the search results on Google.com. One of Google's newest apps, Google Pay (formerly Android Pay) fits right in with this motif, too.

All of these interfaces are also getting a heavier dose of Google's "Product Sans" font, the same font used for the Google and Alphabet logos. The font is now used for buttons all over the OS in notifications and dialog boxes. It's used all throughout Google Pay, and in the past year the font has taken over the Google Assistant, the Pixel's initial setup screens, and the update screen. While Roboto is used by default all throughout Android and is available to third-party OEMs, Product Sans is limited to the Pixel theme and other Google products.

If you want a possible new name for this design, it might be "Material Design 2." Earlier this year, XDA Developers spotted a commit in the Chromium source mentioning "the new Google Material Design 2 standard." While Google hasn't said anything official about a design revamp, it sounds like something that might be publicized during Google I/O 2018. For now, it's hard to not connect wide-ranging Android design changes with this mention of a new design standard.

Android P features a ton of new animations, too, mostly having to do with transitions from screen to screen or app to app. Launching an app from a notification now makes the notification expand vertically to fill the screen and transition to the app. App-to-app transitions are probably the most interesting. When launching one app from another app or when pressing and sliding back to move through previously opened apps, you'll trigger a horizontal sliding animation. It seems inevitable that Android will eventually come up with a fully gesture-based navigation system to match the iPhone X, and a horizontal sliding animation like this would be great for a "back" gesture.

Under the hood, there's a new permission that allows for an app to "control remote app transition animations," so it seems that Google is working on some kind of app-to-app animation coordination system.

The new notification panel

The notification panel is all new! Everything gets a solid white background with rounded corners, and the buttons now live in circles that light up blue when they are on.
Ron Amadeo
Expanded quick settings. If you have more buttons than can fit on the screen, there will be vertical scrolling instead of pagination.
Ron Amadeo
This looks familiar.
On to notifications: you now get a message history in the notification panel.
Ron Amadeo
Android P's notification-blocking recommendation service in action. Sometimes the little red minus buttons get a little overzealous, like in the last picture.
Ron Amadeo
Dark mode is still here.
Ron Amadeo
The new ambient display.
All of these Quick Settings menu panels are gone, but this is what they looked like in Android 8.1.
Ron Amadeo

The first new feature Android P users are likely to notice is the all-new notification panel, which has a revamped design and better messaging notifications. As we previously mentioned as a possibility, Google's renders were not entirely accurate. Google's original picture lacked a date and time, but, in the actual Android P build, it turns out date and time both live in the status bar area. Eventually the notification panel will support "Smart Replies"—Google's machine-learning-generated custom replies to messages—but for now the feature doesn't work.

The new design is here, though, and I think it looks great. The pure-white design is a big upgrade over the ugly transparency introduced in Android 8.1, and the new buttons look nice and clean, if a little bit like the iOS control center.

Google seems to mess with the Quick Settings in every Android version, and again there are big changes in Android P. Before Android P the Quick Settings panel confusingly had two functions: some buttons would be power toggles, and others would open extra options panels for things like connecting to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth devices. From version to version, Google has flip-flopped on how this should work, hiding panels behind a long-press in some versions, or adding little drop-down buttons to launch panels in others. In Android P, the option panels are totally gone—nearly every Quick Settings button is a power toggle, while long pressing will dive into a related settings page.

If you have too many buttons to fit on-screen, Quick Settings will now scroll vertically instead of being horizontally paginated. There's also a new "Alarm" quick settings panel, which oddly doesn't turn the alarm on and off; instead, it just opens the alarm clock app. It's basically an app icon.

The way brightness works has been totally revamped in Android P, and it might be my favorite change: there is now nearly full-range auto-brightness, and it works wonderfully. Step into a dark room and Android will automatically reduce the screen brightness to near minimum levels. Walk out into the light and it will increase to max. You can watch this in real time by leaving the Quick Settings panel open, where the brightness slider will autonomously move left and right with the changing light levels. Moving into darkness is really fun—the slider will quickly zip down to 10 percent and will then spend the next few seconds getting even darker, as if it's meant to account for the slowly changing light sensitively of the human eye.

I haven't seen this last feature anywhere else on the Web, but for some reason I get little red minus circles on certain notifications. Tapping on these will bring up a message that says "You usually dismiss these notifications. Keep showing them?" and then it offers to block the notifications from the app. It seems like Android P comes with an automatic notification-blocker recommendation. The feature doesn't seem well-polished yet—in a multimessage Gmail notification, it tries to stick a red icon next to every line of the message, which results in the circles getting cut off and overlapping the text.

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The Galaxy S9 versus the Galaxy S8 — is it worth the upgrade?

Posted: 11 Mar 2018 06:01 AM PDT

Samsung Galaxy S8 15 Hollis Johnson

It's getting easier and easier to stick with last year's model than upgrading to the latest one.

New smartphones are only getting incremental updates over their predecessors these days, and that's the case with the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S9.

That's not to say the Galaxy S9 isn't a superb smartphone. It's absolutely one of the best smartphones you can buy at the moment. But if you have a Galaxy S8, you have one of the best smartphones of 2017. And the features and power that makes the Galaxy S8 one of the best phones of 2017 go a long way.

Check out why you don't need to upgrade to the Galaxy S9 if you already own the Galaxy S8:

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Essential really wants to solve the screen notch problem

Posted: 10 Mar 2018 09:01 AM PST

In a way, Essential is something of a pioneer. Before the iPhone X helped the world reluctantly embrace the screen notch, the company proudly displayed one atop its first flagship. Since then, of course, it's become a feature, not a bug, with a long list of companies rushing to embrace it on their latest flagship.

But Essential's clearly hoping to solve the issue with a number of patents looking to stick a camera directly behind the display. The Andy Rubin-founded company has been on quite a patent run in recent months — but the ones pertaining to a "camera integrated into a display" are the most compelling of the lot. And if it comes to fruition, it could breathe new life into the company's upcoming handsets after an admittedly slow start.

The patent describes a multi-layered display with camera in which a "substantially transparent region allows light from outside to reach the camera to record an image." The patent points to a potential application in which the camera is mounted behind the LCD.

In the imagery accompanying the post, the camera is positioned in its customary spot up top — you know, where the notch should be. In another iteration of the same idea, the camera is located behind the screen's color layer and "records the light from the outside colored by the color filter layer."

A separate patent has "an irregularly shaped electronic display, including a hollowed out display within which a sensor, such as a camera, can be placed. The manufacturing techniques enable the creation of the hollow anytime during the manufacturing process. The resulting electronic display occupies the full side of the mobile device, with the sensors placed within and surrounded by the display."

There are a ton of Essential patents revolving around the idea, and as Rubin recently pointed out on Twitter, the company also holds a two-year-old patent describing a camera that pops out of the top of the phone — a concept that began showing up on actual devices last month at MWC, along with Huawei's new nose-view keyboard camera.

Both patents include a fun little addition, wherein the camera is located behind a camera icon. Tapping the icon would activate the camera. Of course, depending on how all of this is implemented, you probably don't want to put a camera in a spot that is going to accumulate a substantial amount of your disgusting finger grease.

"The integrated camera serves two purposes: to record pictures," the patent reads, "and to act as a camera icon, that when selected activates the camera. By removing the camera from the front side of the mobile device, or by integrating the camera into the display screen of the mobile device, the size of the mobile device display screen can be increased."

Of course, the standard patent disclaimers apply here — there's no guarantee the company plans to (or is even able to) implement the technologies outlined in these forms. Such patents are often pie in the sky ideas or just IP grabs. We reached out to Essential and the company declined to comment any further on the patents.

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