Everything New In the Android 8.1 Oreo Developer Preview (theverge.com) 42
On Wednesday, Google launched the Android 8.1 Developer Preview. The new version of Android is available for Pixel and Nexus devices, and features a number of under-the-hood changes. The new version tests another change to notifications in which apps can only make a notification sound alert once per second. It also contains an Easter egg: the Android Oreo logo now looks like an actual cookie. The Verge reports that 8.1 is eventually supposed to activate the hidden Pixel Visual Core system-on-a-chip, which aims to make image processing smoother and HDR+ available to third-party developers.
Easter Egg (Score:2)
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https://www.huffingtonpost.com... [huffingtonpost.com]
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And you can develop Android-compatible apps on it. Because it's a continuous fork of Android with customizations. I don't see them diverging FireOS from Android any further anytime soon because that is a lot more work for Amazon.
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They are at android 7.0 as of October per the Wikipedia
Still waiting for 8.0 on my Nexus 6P (Score:2)
I'm stuck at 7.1.2 until Project Fi releases the new version (or I force install the factory image and erase everything on my phone). At this rate, Motorola phones may start getting Oreo before all of Google's supported models have it!
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GNU/Linux phones (Score:3)
For my next phone I'm gonna pony up and buy one with a pure full GNU Linux distro.
The problem is that there aren't many thing on the market yet.
Best contenders are :
Now they are making Sailfish OS [sailfishos.org] which is a continuation of the same development (but have now renamed the core from Meego to mer [merproject.org]).
They used to have some inhouse hardware (Jolla 1 Phone) then some manufacturer failure (Jolla Tablet), then
All fine and good... but... (Score:2)
Why haven't we seen any really cool deal breaking features that would make us want to ditch iOS and switch to Android? For the most part Android and iOS have been just playing off each other, one will make a feature the other will incorporate it in the next version and vice versa.
10 years ago when Apple released the iPhone, it really had shaken the market up. It even forced Android to redesign its OS, hence giving Apple nearly a 2 year advantage, as competitor were in a mad rush to change their designs.
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Even iPhone depends (Score:3)
10 years ago when Apple released the iPhone, it really had shaken the market up.
Well, depends on your point of reference.
By comparison of common feature phone of the era : Yes it was revolutionary.
By comparison of what PDAs have been doing for the past few decades, starting from Psion, PalmOS, etc.. : The iPhone was just "meh..."
It was just a bit more modern than the then current iterations of PalmOS that started to show their age. And it was just a little bit less sucky then Microsoft's usual Windows bullshit. On the hand iOS completely lacked any 3rd party apps support, whereas the m
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Palm had a smart phone that ran Palm OS, and still the iPhone threw them back to the drawing board to make the failed WebOS.
Multi-touch was the key. Before multi-touch was just a fun little gizmo, what Microsoft called its surface technology, was meant to be big screens on tables to replace desktop usage. PDA Makers at the time, didn't think that multi-touch was worth it, because the small screen interacting with many fingers seemed silly, because they were still thinking in terms of buttons. Or screen b
That doesn't mean what you think it means BeauZo (Score:1)
If the logo looked like an actual Easter Egg, that still wouldn't be an Easter Egg, unless it was hidden somehow, such as if it only looked like an actual cookie if the system clock was changed to the date of release of the Oreo cookie (or the Android Oreo release date, etc.).
Comment removed (Score:3)
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Lol, as if "power users" make up any more than 0.1% of the user base. Similarly I'm sure that 90% of developers don't *need* what you're pining for either.
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You forgot a pony, and a kitchen sink.
These changes would ensure their continued dominance as a platform, as us powerusers/developers would have little desire to seek alternatives.
You really have no idea about the market for mobile devices at all do you.
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- Proper GNU utilities instead of whatever *box flavour they've used in the past
Sure, right after the FSF re-license them as Apache 2.0, as in when hell freezes over. So I'll just skip to the conclusion.
These changes would ensure their continued dominance as a platform, as us powerusers/developers would have little desire to seek alternatives.
1. The premise doesn't support the conclusion, the mass market follows the shiny
2. Most heavy cell phone users != power users, just social media addicts
3. What alternatives? Seriously. There's Android, iPhone, AOSP and *crickets*...
Notification period (Score:2)
"The new version tests another change to notifications in which apps can only make a notification sound alert once per second."
This is definitely a minor thing, but once you've started looking at it should be a lot more limited. A configurable time would be ideal, but if you want to make it a sensible default it should be more like one sound alert every 10 minutes unless you've looked at a notification in between--if you're actually checking messages as they come in you'll still get all the defaults, but y
Once per second (Score:3)
I always found it comical after driving into the outback for a week without WiFi or mobile reception, when coming back to the real world I would suddenly hit a tower and my phone would go mental giving the Facebook notification sound over and over again in such rapid succession that each sound cut off the previous one.
When I first thought about this I figured there should be a priority based system where each app only triggers a notification sound once per priority level and not at all if the same or a higher priority message comes through.