Google Nexus 5

Maverick Jester said:
I'm also running the Android L dev preview via MultiBoot. My thoughts:

I love the design- the animations, effects and transitions are much improved, basically iOS-esque in terms of polish. They add a whole new layer to Android from a design standpoint. It also has a much cleaner, less cluttered feel. Even the new multitasking menu feels simpler to use, simply because the design and flow is similar to other Android apps (notably Chrome). It's still missing a few things here and there (a clear all button would be nice in the aforementioned multitasking menu; a few elements of the UI still exhibit the Holo Blue design) but for the most part, it looks damn good while still being immediately familiar.

The colour scheme is not as overtly different and jarring as the iOS 6 to 7 jump was. The palette is brighter, but it is also cleaner, layered and it does well to provide a unified approach to navigating Android, and soon all of Google's services. When you add in the justification of UI elements, visual tactility present in buttons, tiles and even scroll bars, all tying in with the lighter justification of the Roboto font, it all adds up to a much more pleasant to look at UI.

I must say, ART in this implementation is far snappier than anything I have ever experienced on the current Dalvik runtime, or the corresponding ART runtime found in the current builds of Android. Honestly, it's close to a night and day difference. Google weren't kidding with their performance improvements.

I haven't run it long enough to gauge how efficient it is on power, but it doesn't seem to be excessive. The battery bar is a bit inaccurate in terms of what it defines your usage time left to be (normally quotes me an hour or so on 90% battery life), but that may just be a bug in this dev build.

Overall- for a development build, it's very stable. I would go so far as to call it a beta build, and it is good enough to use as a daily driver for some. A few small tweaks, a larger rollout of the Material-designed apps, and compatibility with more apps, and this will be very welcome come Q3.

I have a feeling that this will be officially launched with a new device, probably a tablet. Here's hoping :)
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Nice post, I can't wait. :D
 
I'm very excited about this:

Android "L" Feature Spotlight: New Camera API Enables Burst Mode, Thorough Control Over Photos, And Much More

The Android team has been hard at work replacing old code that hasn't scaled well with newer and more powerful hardware. We've long known that the camera API was destined to see a massive update, but we were missing details like a release date or exactly what was coming. Thanks to the L release, we can finally see what has been in the works for all these many months.

One of the most important aspects of the new Camera 2 API is a dramatic increase in performance over the previous interface. The Camera 2 system is now capable of delivering full resolution images at the same speed the hardware can capture them thanks to a fully synchronized pipeline model. This allows the Nexus 5 to achieve 30 frames per second while capturing 8 at it's maximum of 8 megapixels.

In addition to the profound performance improvements, the new camera API also includes burst mode, Digital Negative format (similar to RAW), HDR+, and full manual control of capture and post-processing. Many of the finer control configurations can also be modified, including:

  • Exposure time
  • ISO Sensitivity
  • Frame duration
  • Lens focus distance
  • Flash trigger
  • Color correction matrix
  • JPEG metadata
  • Tonemap curve
  • Crop region
  • AE / AF / AWB mode
  • AE / AWB lock
  • AF trigger
  • Precapture AE trigger
  • Metering regions
  • Exposure compensation
  • Target FPS range
  • Capture intent
  • Video stabilization
This is a huge step up for anybody using the camera, as we're bound to see higher quality results with less lag. Access to deeper customization controls and more image data will also make it possible for developers to accomplish much more with the photos we take. If you're a developer and eagerly looking forward to messing around with all of the new goodies, there are samples for capturing photos and videos in the new preview SDK for L. They are titled Camera2Basic and Camera2Video. For everybody else, try messing around with the new camera in the L preview on a Nexus 5 where some of these improvements have already taken shape.
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Oh, and this one is for OrbitalDawn:

Nexus line is not dead.

Google's Head Of Android Engineering Says That The Nexus Line Isn't Going Anywhere

Earlier this year, both Evan 'Evleaks' Blass and The Information's Amir Efrati claimed that the upcoming Android Silver program would replace the Nexus line of developer phones. Blass went so far as to say, "There is no Nexus 6. Farewell, Nexus." Both of those reports would seem to be contradicted by our own exclusive reveal of the HTC Volantis, a new Nexus tablet. Now we've got even more claims that the Nexus hardware line isn't going anywhere soon, this time right from the proverbial horse's mouth.

Over at ReadWrite there's a telling interview with Dave Burke, Google's Head of Android Engineering and the Nexus program. Writer Dan Rowinski gets right to the point, asking Burke about Android Silver and the various reports that it would replace the Nexus line of phones and tablets. He replied:

People just get excited by concepts and forget why we do things. We are still invested in Nexus... People have been commenting about Nexus because there is something else and they think that means the end of Nexus. That is the totally wrong conclusion to make.
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That seems like a pretty specific refutation. Burke declined to comment on Android Silver, neither confirming nor denying the upcoming premium partnership between Google and major mobile manufacturers. He did go on to say that Google is continuing to develop Nexus hardware with new versions of Android, which would mean a new Nexus device for the L release later this year (possibly the HTC tablet, but more probably a new Nexus phone as well).
Android Police broke the initial story on Android Silver, demonstrated internal screenshots and designs for retail kiosks showing off the high-end phones running stock Android software. Nothing in our initial scoop indicated that the Nexus line was disappearing, though it's a pretty natural leap - a company like Google, which doesn't directly manufacture phone hardware, would be a strange place to find two hardware branding initiatives. Silver is definitely real, and definitely exists at Google in some form. Exactly what it will be when, and if, it debuts at retailers is still up in the air.

Also of note is Android One, the new low-cost initiative that Google revealed earlier this week at I/O. Android One is designed to push low-cost smartphones based on reference designs running stock Android software, selling at $100 unsubsidized or less, to emerging markets. Android One will begin a rollout with various hardware and carrier partners in India later this year. Assuming that both One and Silver come to fruition, and that the Nexus program is indeed sticking around, that would mean that Google would have three hardware initiatives covering the low end, (roughly) mid-range, and high-end hardware spectrums starting next year.

Update: Emir Efrati points out that he never said the whole Nexus line is going away, just that the phones would: "The expensive effort involves dumping the four-year-old Google Nexus phone brand in favor of a new program called Silver." That's certainly a possibility, given that the only Nexus device on the horizon is a tablet, and LG (which made the last two Nexus phones) says it has none in the pipeline. IN the quote above, Dave Burke does not specify between phones and tablets.
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Maverick Jester said:
No problem. Enjoy. Even without Xposed, it's pretty compelling.
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I am busy installing "L" ...

/there is a weird kind of excitement in my bones ...
/am I really that big a geek?

EDIT: Well now ... colour me impressed! I like the interface - although I would like to have an option to have a dark system menu. It runs smooth. Recents has been prettified (but a colleague said it is Apple-like - that pissed me off :mad: ). The overall experience feels fresh and new. It does not really feel like just another upgrade for Android - it really feels new.

EDIT: TB DOESN'T WORK!! I am very grumpy about this!!
 
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OGroteKoning said:
I am busy installing "L" ...

/there is a weird kind of excitement in my bones ...
/am I really that big a geek?

EDIT: Well now ... colour me impressed! I like the interface - although I would like to have an option to have a dark system menu. It runs smooth. Recents has been prettified (but a colleague said it is Apple-like - that pissed me off :mad: ). The overall experience feels fresh and new. It does not really feel like just another upgrade for Android - it really feels new.

EDIT: TB DOESN'T WORK!! I am very grumpy about this!!
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Yeah, unfortunately a few apps don't work (didn't know that TB didn't work, though). But overall, it's pretty damn nice.

Oh, and your colleague is nuts. Apple ripped off the card design from Google with their multitasking menu.
 
MultiRom'd "L" and I must admit it really is a fantastic build. Smooth and seamless is the order of the day. I am considering doing a complete wipe this evening and running it as the daily driver without MultiRom - Yes its that Good!

Thanks to Maverick Jester and OGroteKoning on the thread posts which helped.
 
soldierboi said:
MultiRom'd "L" and I must admit it really is a fantastic build. Smooth and seamless is the order of the day. I am considering doing a complete wipe this evening and running it as the daily driver without MultiRom - Yes its that Good!

Thanks to Maverick Jester and OGroteKoning on the thread posts which helped.
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You're not finding the largish number of incompatible apps an issue? Other than that, it really is good enough to run as a daily driver.
 
I too, have been MultiRom'ing "L" for two days now.

Very smooth. Animations are awesome! You can see where stuff is coming from and where it is going. Makes the OS feel "alive" if you can call it that. I would definitely not call it a daily driver though. My play store keeps crashing and super su keeps saying binary not found. I guess I'll be flashing supersu 2.01 at some point. It's meant to have been built for "L". We shall see. There's also some subtle UI nitbits that bother me. Firstly WTF is up with the PlayStation buttons. Secondly, I found some places have very light text on white backgrounds. But yes, small things like that.

Overall, very happy with "L" and material design. Won't be my daily driver yet though.
 
Project Volta looks impressive rather early on:

Examining Project Volta: We put Android L through our battery test

Do Google's power optimizations work in the real world?

For each Android release, Google likes to have a "Project" that picks an area of weakness and focuses on tuning the whole OS to fix it. In Jelly Bean we had Project Butter, a concerted effort to make Android's UI animations run at 60fps. In KitKat there was Project Svelte, which aimed to get the OS running on only 512MB of RAM. Now in Android L we have "Project Volta," an attempt to boost the battery life of Android devices. Like the projects that came before it, Volta is a wide-ranging effort that touches many different parts of the OS.

Google did some testing and found that waking a device up for one second burns two minutes of standby time. This isn't just turning the screen on—it also means an app waking the processor and modem to check for updates. To cut down on this battery burn, Android L has a new "JobScheduler" API that allows the OS to batch up unimportant app requests like database cleanup and log uploading. Developers can also request that housekeeping functions be delayed until the device is plugged in. Further, the OS will not wake the device up for a network task when there is no network connectivity.

Google also made an enhanced battery stat tracker called "Battery Historian." The tool added a ton of new power-tracking capabilities and allowed the company to visualize all that data in a pretty chart. Better analytics gave Google more insight into what was using all that power, which allowed it to tweak things all over the OS for better battery life.

There's the switch from Dalvik to ART, a faster virtual machine that compiles apps once instead of every time they are run. ART is also generally faster and more efficient than Dalvik, which means less time spent processing and less power usage.

That all sounds great, but does Project Volta actually work? We decided to find out by running our review battery test. Just like in our reviews, we were as scientific as possible. We did the test on a single device to remove variances in battery, which meant flashing to 4.4.4, signing in, updating apps, charging up, running the test, and then flashing the same device to the L preview. Our battery test keeps the screen on and automatically loads webpages over Wi-Fi every 15 seconds until the battery dies. For each run, the screen brightness was set to 200 cd/m2, as verified by a colorimeter, and for consistency, we averaged two runs each. The results?

111.001.jpg

Thirty-six percent more battery life. Installing the L preview on our Nexus 5 gave us two extra hours of runtime. These tests were done on a beat up, daily-driver phone, so the final numbers aren't necessarily indicative of what the L preview could achieve on a new device. It's the difference that matters.

Android L also has a "battery saver" feature that lowers the device performance and cuts the background data and screen brightness when the device hits 15-percent battery, but we disabled this feature for our tests. We like to have our devices at full power, and we don't want a hyper-aggressive phone-crippling feature messing with our results. Presumably, you could gain even more runtime by turning the battery saver on. This test is more about the general under-the-hood improvements that are running all the time.

This is just an early look at Android L's battery life. The current release is a "developer preview," but Google has already been able to make a meaningful difference in the runtime of L devices. Some of the new power-saving features, like the job scheduler, require app support, so there's probably room to improve not only in the OS but in Google's bundled apps, too. By the time the final version of L comes out, things could be even better. Google definitely looks to be on the right track.
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ph4t3 said:
Awesome.

Although my phone has been showing significantly less battery life on "L" than KitKat hey.
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Yeah, I've experienced the same thing. I'm not sure if this is related to MultiBoot, because from the videos I've watched of others using the L preview, battery status and reporting seems accurate.
 
OrbitalDawn said:
Yeah, dunno when that'll be. I'd really hope for the end of the year, but who knows.
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Over and above the Nexus 5, what would you consider necessary on the next device? I'd wager that the 5 is pretty complete as it is, at least from a hardware standpoint. The software is catching up in leaps and bounds, too.
 
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