
Android Marshmallow: No Big Deal
Google announced its new operating system, Android Marshmallow, and it feels like it is not bringing too much to the table. Indeed, it does attempt to make the user’s experience a little more fluid, but definitely not enough.
Google keeps naming its new devices after some sweet treats, but while this is aimed at having better visibility on the market plus a little extra cuteness, it is also an indirect indicator that too much Android is not that good.
Let’s start with the basics: Jamal Eason, the Android product manager, tried to make a funny promotion joke the Android Developers Blog. “Who doesn’t like marshmallows? We like them!” Of course they do, but people have to promote to make a living right? While Google might like and pride itself with the new OS, people might not like it so much.
The new operating system has been announced a few months back, on 28 of May 2015, but we did not get an actual release date, just some expectations that it is going to be released in the third quarter. So are you excited about the new OS? Great! But you should know that you need to wait a little more.
Google, not surprisingly, states that Android Marshmallow is “the most powerful Android release yet”. It is not like they could say anything else anyway. It could be a very private intruding operating system, a buggy one or a very slow one, it would still be the most powerful Android release, simply because it is the latest one.
To make things a little vague, the new Android operating system offers an abundance of new features and improvements, but we won’t be able to see them. They are not really visible to the users.
They are trying to get away with the Doze example. Doze is a feature that detects when your motion sensor is not working accordingly. If it is not, then it will cut the power off and we will have more battery. Ok, sounds about right, but what other “invisible features” will we be getting?
There was a “good feature” discovered two weeks ago that allowed sites to detect whether your battery was low or not. This send signals to the sites so that they would activate a power saving feature for your phone. The only problem was that sites could see your entire browser history based on having access to your battery? Any features like those around?
The good thing is that the new OS will have support for a new type of USB which you can plug either way around to your phone. So you won’t have to stay up at night trying to figure out how to plug your USB.
But is this enough for a new operating system? It doesn’t seem like enough for us. The entire update is bringing some vague and unseen features and a better battery experience. We certainly expect Google to do a lot better than this.
Photo Credits slashgear.com