Android L: "Material Design", Project Volta, Improved Battery Life, and More

This year’s Google I/O conference closed yesterday and as always, had shown us myriads of new products, innovations and announcements from the search giant as well as its partners.

One of the biggest announcements that caught many people’s attentions was that of the new Android operating system called the Android L, which was announced on the first day at the conference by Google’s Sundar Pichai.

All-encompassing updates has been made to the operating system with bunches of new features added and lots of changes made. Out of which, The Android L introduced a simplified ‘Material Design’ interface, which is flatter and more colorful.

According to an in-depth review by PhoneArea, “Put in most simple terms — no design element has been spared, and even the software navigation keys have gone through a redesign (now a triangle, circle, and square). What’s more, the new look, apart from being seamless across all Google platforms, has also been simplified down to the basics, and is now flatter, more colorful, and quite a bit more likable.”

Aside from that, the OS also introduced improved search functionality, improved battery life or ‘Project Volta’ and animated actions.

“That last bit is, in a big way, a feeling influenced by the the inclusion of rich animation feedback to actions, which, in plain speak, means that essential operations, like clicking a button, switching a tab, flipping through recents, etc, will all be animated. Thankfully, all of this has been done tastefully from what we’ve seen so far, and is not overwhelming or overly flashy.” wrote PhoneArea.

Preview is available for developers with Nexus 5 and Nexus 7 smart phones.

Android L: "Material Design", Project Volta, Improved Battery Life, and More

Project Volta aimed to improve the battery life in Android L

Yesterday some big announcements came at the Google I/O developer conference where Google unveiled its next Android OS namely the Android L. At the event, a new Android project namely the Project Volta was released that is aimed to improve the battery life in Android L. Through this project Volta, users and developers will get some unique battery saving tools.

Looking it from a developer’s perspective, Project Volta will aim to add new tools that can determine the reason and cause about how an app would affect the battery life of the device. This will also ensure that when the battery is draining out, it will prevent certain tasks from initiating. The first part of this project is called as Battery Historian meaning that it gives complete details regarding when the battery was drained and which part of the app is sucking out more battery juice which will help developers to identify and investigate the crucial parts of the app. The other part of the project  is the Job Schedular API, thereby helping developers to selectively choose the tasks to be performed depending on the battery conditions. This means certain tasks that consume more battery juice would take place only during the phone is kept for charging or if the battery is low, the phone will avoid updating apps.

Looking now from the user’s perspective, there is an inclusion of an built-in Battery Saver mode as found in premium Samsung and HTC devices. This built-in version will bring down display brightness, throttle your CPU and would even limit the updates at the background. However, Google is considered to be using a completely different kind of metric for this application so the comparison would get bit difficult. Google with its Battery Saver mode is considered to be offering an additional 90 minutes to usage for its Nexus 5.  Get more details regarding Google’s new features here.

Project Volta aimed to improve the battery life in Android L