so let's take a look now at android 4.4. let's have a look at some of the things that have changed. now with android 4.4 on a nexusdevice it's free from all of the extras that the mainmanufacturers like samsung, htc load onto their devices. instead we get what does google want from its
Android settings, android device. things are very cut down you get a slim set of google applications and no extra fluff or bloatware. now the first thing to notice is you couldalmost call it the candification of interfaces. certainly it feels like it's taken a little
bit of a leaf out of the ios playbook but what they/'ve gone for here is somethingthat's full fully colourful bright, part of that is being given by thewallpaper that comes as default but in part also if you look at theicons you'll notice they're a much higher resolution and there's really nice anti-aliasing going on. you can't see any jagged lines or edges or anything like that and the icons have a kind of pop to them thatwas kind of missing i think in the previous versions of default android asit were.
overall everything kind of just feels thatlittle bit more polished and groovy i think isprobably the way to put it. and groovy i think is probably the wayto put it. yes, that's it. android 4.4 kitkat is groovylooking. you can debate that one if you like in the comments but i think it's groovy looking. they've also for instance, a few of theseitems have been downloaded just as my system's auto back upkicks in and just starts delivering all my apps to me but they've now added a settings icon within the app tray which i don't ever remember being there before or if it was, it had a really
ugly looking icon for it. there's now anice icon that will take you straight in to your settings which obviously if you long press and you can just drop that wherever you happen to want it to be. standard android stuff. there's nothing new there as it were. there's no pinch mechanism so if youwant to pinch between your home screens forget it that's not part of the androidexperience, when you're looking at the pure google android. one of the things that was interesting is they've released a recording tool
which is apparently available for developers. now i thought it was actually included as part of android 4.4 out of the box but it doesn't appear to be, or at least i can't find it anywhere. maybe you have to go in and turn that on through developer tools. a lot of the stuff you will know pretty well, you know, it's the google services, it's google+, it's the gallery app it's drive, it's chrome, you know the standard stuff that comes withandroid 4.4. unfortunately made a little bit more difficult here by auto back up having kicked in and deciding to drop all of
my apps to me. although on the plus side at least i don't have to go and download them all again. and so one of the things that's always worthlooking at on a new nexus device is having a look at how the settings andnotification shade area has changed so one of the main things is they nowlook quite a bit nicer than they used to, going with this kind of cool black and white vibe and feels like it has more pop to it than it used to do. it looked a bit mucky before in my opinion but also if we come into here we can get into our settings area.
this stuff is pretty much the muchness.i haven't noticed any major changes in here particularly. the only big one is this printing option down at thebottom. that i do not remember being part of previous android experiences and was mentioned thatit was going to get baked directly into the operating system from here on out. so if you happen to use cloud printing or if you have any of the google cloud print services available or the hp print remote print then effectively you canprint directly from your android device to any printer that your google account knows about. very handy
i must say. so we've got our usual thing going on, our wifi bluetooth. one major change they've made in android 4.4 is better support for low-power bluetoothdevices things like fit bit and so on. if we come into more we've got our airplane mode nfc, default sms app, now this is new and this allows you, if you have multiple different short messaging service apps on yourdevice you can pick which one will be the default app.fantastic and about time too.
and one thing they've done with google hangouts is integrate sms and hangouts into one application. so now hangouts becomes your messaging app, you don't have hangouts, google talk, sms app and everything else. you just have one app to do everything. like i say, for manufacturers developers and so on, you can hook into this and if you havean sms app you'll be able to make it the defaultfrom now on. that is really really great news. you can just pick which app youwant to use and you're not constantly fighting notifications
all the time. nfc, some changes to the way nfc works purely from the point of view of makingpayments, that's one of the big things they've done here. so nfc now has an alternative secure mode effectively which makes it work properly with theway that the payment processors and providers wanted it to work. this now should remove a lot of the problems we had with google wallet not being compatible with anything on the payment side of things. so it will be very good to see that hopefully this year, i keep saying that every year but hopefully this will be the year
nfc catches on. tethering and portable hotspot, vpn, you do your mobile networks, plan your mobile broadcasts in there. now, one of the other new areas is home. now in here you can basically set what your launcher is going to be so that's the default launcher and i've also got smart launcher that's just installed as well from my auto backup. and effectively you can now set these ordelete them as necessary. that is going to make life so much easier for a lot of people me especially who uses a lot of different launchers. no more hacking basically to make sure your
launcher always uses the default when you hit your back button. in sound we've got the usual standard kind of stuff, adjust your volume, choose your ringtone, set to vibrate when ringing, dial touch and everything like that. lock sounds, touch sounds which i'm sopleased the've turned off by default. thank you google you have no idea howannoying it is when, obviously i have to reinstall my device quite often for new roms and updates and fiddling around with it and one of the most annoying things is having to go through the initial set up hearing ker-blip, ker blip,
or blip blip blip every time i touch something.so having that turned off by default is fantastic you can of course turn that on if you need to, why would you? display. in here we can adjust our brightness uses the google standard brightness slider nothing special there. wallpaper this iswhere we can set our android wallpaper including new smart wallpapers i'm not actually sure about those yet. live wallpaper is in there, nothing particularly exciting, gallery just my photos basically and obviously wallpapers at the bottom whichincludes a couple of
new ones by the looks of it. yes, very nice, let's have a bit of that shall we? oops, do that properly. set wallpaper up at the top. there we go. there's also your sleep time out and your auto rotate settings. sleep time out this is how long the screen will stay on for before it goes off saving your battery. you've got the daydream which you can set to pretty much all the stuff you could do before. they haven't expanded that unfortunately. so you've got photo frames that's one of my apps that's added itself in, standard colours and the
clock obviously. set your fonts pulse notification light, i always get that one mixed up.get them the wrong way round. effectively whenever you get a message or an alert on your device it will pulse the notification light which is somewhere here i think. where is it on the nexus 5? that's a really interesting point. does it have one? must have. well, we will find out where the pulse light isbecause actually i'm not sure it's got one, which would beinteresting and you've also got access to
wireless display if you want to, which is known as mirror cast i believe, togive it its technical term. if we come into storage this is where wecan do our space as you can see i've only got 9gig available now, 12gig overall this was a 16 gig nexus 5 model and obviously a load of my apps have now installed themselves. interesting to note though, if you gotthe galaxy s4 then you actually only got 9gig of available space because of all of the extra stuff that samsung had installed. so it's reallynice here that a 16 gig device
actually had 12.5 gig available for me toinstall things even now, when i've installed all of my stuff in the auto backup i still have nearly as much space as a samsung would out of the box. kind of shows you how bloated some of these main manufacturers have become with their operating systems. you know, one thing that we really need to see from android is more space as default when you take itout of the box not less because you're adding more and more useless features so good on google for keeping things slim andmaking sure that you know
as many gig as possible is free for us.battery, this is very standard stuff shows you what's running in your deviceright now and what's been using up space over the preceding time period. so you can see here my screen is draining 30% of my battery android os 15% android system etcetera. very handy way of just seeing what's goingon on the device and what might be killing your battery. if we go into apps again whole standard stuff. they've not made many tweaks here really. i think be a lot easier you know everything'sgonna be grey
so we've got the nice black background, grey status bars etcetera. but the interface generally hasn't changed that much on the android 4.4 update. location we can turn our location serviceson or off and we can also now change how accurate we would like that tobe and it gives a bit more information over 4.3 on what's really going on there. if you drop into battery saving mode it will just do wifi and mobile networks to estimate location put it on high and it will kick in the gps as well. do device only, use gps to pinpoint the location. so you've got a few choices now as to how you want location to work
and more importantly thank you google, it actually explained properly how that works and how it really relates to saving your battery etcetera. security, it's your screen locks it's your widgets on your home screen encrypting your phone passwords everything like that and would you allow unknown sources always worth killing in my opinion and install from internal storage so if there's anything security-related you will find it in there. language and inputthis is where your keyboards are kept. as you can see i've got quite a few including google hindi input
opinion even. which i've definitely never installed previously, and google korea, definitely never installed that one but presumably that is just defaulted in for us which is nice. now with backup and reset what they've allowed you to do is to back up absolutely everything into the cloud now up to google services so you can go into there and it just has your standard options in there basically. date and time, accessibility and the aforementioned printing tool but overall there's not a huge amount of newstuff for android 4.4 in the settings.
a lot of it really is under the hood withandroid 4.4 it's the little things that they've done to really tweak it. much better memory use onlow-powered devices with 512 ram new options for the nfc. a few new tweaks here and there and new stuff for developers but overall android 4.4 probably doesn't offer anawful lot to the average end user. it doesn't suddenly make this the nextbig phone release or anything like that. what it does do is incrementally updateandroid providing newer hardware specifications for thingslike low-power bluetooth etcetera and all that is really really welcome anyway and what it ultimately means is that
you know the next generation of hardwarecoming out over the next 12 months will be able to work with all of the latestgadgets but doing so in a lower power profile as possible. everything really with android 4.4 feels a lot like when they released the first iteration of butter, which i think was 4.2 or 4.2.2
and it's almost about let's tweak this, let's fix this, let's update this, there's no big revolutions here necessarily in android 4.4 but overall lots of little tweaks that add up to a very welcome set of changes. one of the thingsthat we always have to do
