The Android L is finally here

Today, Android 5.0 and a 10-foot-tall statue of a Lollipop will join ice cream sandwich, a chocolate doughnut, and others on the grass in front of Google’s campus in Mountain View, Calif. This is how the news will come of the latest major update to Android, not with a mega event or a hyped press conference or long lines outside gadget stores, but with the installation of an lawn ornament.

Android 5.0, Lollipop is the latest major release of Android and the first to be fully developed under Sundar Pichai, the Google senior vice president who took over the OS operation last year. Pichai is introducing three Google-designed devices as well including the supersize Nexus 6 smartphone, manufactured by Motorola Mobility (MMI) with a fairly gigantic 6-inch screen. Pichai hopes the phone will be the first of a series of new Lollipop-powered computers in living rooms, cars, and just about everywhere else.

He said, “We aren’t only trying to ship two products,” indirectly referring to rival Apple’s well-received pair of new iPhones. “We are trying to enable thousands of products at the same time.”

Lollipop is  a svelte OS, capable of running on 512 megabytes of memory, which means that even the cheap phones spreading through China and India can pack in Google’s latest features.

Lollipop’s look, called “material design,” uses moving icons and shifting font sizes in an effort to organize information more clearly on screen. It also attempts for the first time to unify a user’s various Android devices, including a new set-top box that plays Web video on a TV.

Motorola’s Nexus 6 smartphone has a sleek, curved aluminium back and a crisp organic light-emitting diode screen that the company says can run for hours after charging for just 15 minutes. The phone will go on sale at all major U.S. carriers by the end of the year.

Pichai avoids using the word “phablet” but says the Nexus 6 screen was a result of consumer demand. Similar-size phones now make up 25 percent of Android devices, according to researcher Strategy Analytics. They are particularly popular in Asia. It’s unclear, however, whether customers who now have a super size option from Apple will still flock to an Android version.

Click here to know the features of Android L.



Source : Businessweek