By now, Android L has made itself known to the world, and this time Google has taken a leaf out of the likes of Microsoft and Apple's books and given the public at large an opportunity to get an early glimpse of the new OS before release. To do this, you'll need either a Nexus 5 or a Nexus 7 2013 – though it's probably not a good idea to install a beta operating system on your main Android device. That is, unless you have a mobile column to write...
Installation
The instructions and downloads required for the Android L preview are all on Google's developer preview site (developer.android.com/preview) and, at first glance, are straightforward. To be fair to Google, many will follow these instructions and have no issues at all, but this was not the case for me. As those of you whom read my columns may know, I'm no stranger to ROM flashing and, on unfortunate occasions, unbricking; so the simple instructions here gave me no cause for concern.Sadly, though, the first attempt ended in boot hanging, as did the second, even when pushing the ROM contents manually via ADB. A third attempt even wiped the recovery partition. Eventually, employing the use of the excellent Unified Android Toolkit yielded a full boot, albeit one taking an initial ten minutes. The moral of the story is this: only undertake this if you know how to get back out of it, otherwise you may have a nice new mini chopping board instead.78 Issue 1323.
In Use
Thankfully, in use, Android L is quite pleasant. At first glance, bar the new wallpaper and the slightly different lock screen, you'll wonder what the difference is. The first time you'll encounter a major change is likely to be with notifications, whether with the new Now-like bars that drop down in an iOS way or the drop-down bar that initially hides the quick buttons that require a second drag to reveal.The next major UI changes you may see will probably be the settings and the application switcher. Settings has a far more attractive, lighter layout that is confusing at first but soon becomes clear and friendly. Changing your Home launcher is now handled here and in a simple manner. Switching apps takes on a Rolodex-like look, with each app layered on top of the next in a card stack. In use, it is akin to the old Apple Coverflow UI, but in practice it works in much the same way as before.
The gallery application has also had a big update, adding a ton of interesting filters and styles, all tweakable. While there's nothing you won't have seen in the hundreds of 70s filter apps already available, they are fun to play with and can add a special something to a drab snapshot.
While Android L doesn't have a huge leap visually, it's under the hood where the changes have been most apparent. L is the first version of the OS to drop the old Dalvik runtime, instead moving over fully to ART. In practice, this means instead of compiling the app each time it's run (Dalvik), it precompiles on installation and launches far quicker (ART). ART is actually an option in KitKat, but running it in that will highlight the problem with L too: a few apps have not been compiled to work with ART. They will eventually, of course, but bare this is in mind if you want to switch now. L is pretty snappy with ART, though, and on a prerelease build, it's a good sign of things to come.
The other big leap with L is Project Volta, Google's attempt to squeeze more life from the batteries powering Android devices. Part of this saving comes from ART itself or the lack of Dalvik's on-thefly compilation, as well as analysis of what is stored ready to go and what requires waking the device's cores for. In practice, I have found it has been longer between charges, though difficult to quantify. Others have given ranges of 25-35% more power, which on a preview build, is impressive.
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