Google’s New Material Design Direction
With several iterations of Google’s Mobile operating system starting from Android 1.2 cupcake till yesterday when Google unleashed Android 5.0 Lollipop — the Android Operating system has undergone a slew of changes. Android 5.0 Lollipop formally known as Android L, is Google’s biggest Smartphone Operating system release yet. Android 5.0 Lollipop is debuting on three new Nexus devices — the Nexus 6 smartphone, Nexus 9 tablet, and Nexus Player streaming media device — and will be available on the Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 7, Nexus 10, and Google Play Edition devices in the coming weeks.
Google has gone in for several visual changes and enhancements and it’s what the company calls Material Design. It has a whole new way of operation with more fluid animations, a fresher design with a more assuming color palette There is also a revamped multittasking menu of which am personally not a fan of but the new design offers new ways to interact with your voice. If you have used the latest versions of Google + or Chrome on your Android phone; all these app use this new Material Design.
One Material Design for all devices
So why Material Design? The company saw it wise to have a whole new design initiative that would unify the software’s look and feel across various form factors, whether that’s a tablet, smartwatch, smartphone, home media streamer, or something else. So far we have talked about the visual enhancements that a lay man can see when using the new OS, but Lollipop brings over 5,000 new APIs for developers to tap into and lets multiple different Android devices with various form factors work better together. There will be seamless synchronization with things such as songs, photos, apps, and recent searches. This means when you play a song on your phone, you can pick up where you let on your tablet. Lollipop also includes new notification controls to limit alerts during meetings and other time.
Then in comes project Volta, Google’s initiative to drastically improve battery life and the company claims that with Android Lollipop you will be able to get out 90 more minutes of life between charges. More Lollipop features include
- Multiple user accounts,
- Guest user modes,
- New ways to secure your device via trusted Bluetooth connections.
- Protection against resetting the phone to factory defaults, which is designed to make it difficult for phone thieves to use a stolen device.
I repeat, Android 5.0 Lollipop is Google’s biggest release yet — as it offers both visual and under the hood significant updates for both smartphones and tablets and also other platforms like wearables, home appliances and cars. This is Google’s software future an operating system to rule them all and one that will interact with other devices.
