Android Advisor

122 Pages·2017·13.402 MB·English

LATEST SMARTPHONES, TABLETS & WEARABLES
ANDROID
ADVISOR
ISSUE
42
FROM IDG
ANDROID
OREO:
Google’s best
ever OS
FULL REVIEW
Samsung
Galaxy Note8
+
Game on: Our favourite
games revealed
ANDROID ADVISOR
CONTENTS
4
REVIEWS
4 Android Oreo
13 Samsung Galaxy Note8
35 Sony Xperia XA1
HANDS-ON
47 LG V30
55 Sony Xperia XZ1
35
62 Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact
COMPARISON
68 Android Nougat vs Oreo
68
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CONTENTS
Keep updated with all the latest Android
Advisor news, by following us on Facebook
12
14
PREVIEW
Google Pixel 2 75
FEATURE
Android Nougat tips 83
Gmail for Android tricks 92
ROUND-UP
Best Android games 99
99
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Android Oreo
Free
N
ever mind the name rumours, here’s the inal
product. It was always going to be called
Oreo, wasn’t it? Android 8 is now available
for Google’s own devices following a surprisingly
stable beta period.
We’ve been using it on Pixel and Nexus devices
here at Android Advisor, and it’s a pleasingly reined
update to Nougat. Google’s attention to detail is
improving, and Oreo represents an Android user’s
dream of granular customization mixed with genuinely
useful and thoughtful tweaks to the user interface.
It’s an operating system that is reaching maturity
following the larger aesthetic changes brought about
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by Marshmallow and Nougat. There aren’t any big
new headline features to show of here, but Google
is wise to resist. The only thing to worry about now
is how skin-heavy manufacturers such as Samsung
will bring Oreo to their smartphones.
Availability
Oreo is available to download now, for free, for
Google’s Pixel, Pixel XL, Nexus 6P, Nexus 5X and Pixel
C tablet. The discontinued Nexus Player also gets it.
Design
Android Oreo is an update lacking in a headline
feature. Nougat was good enough on the Pixel and
subsequent iterations from OEMs that Google is in
the enviable position of being able
to make some core, sometimes
unnoticed but important lourishes
to  its operating system.
I’ve been running the public
betas of Oreo on a 5in Pixel
and now having used the full
public release can say it’s the
best to date – but you knew that
already, didn’t you?
iOS and Android by and large at
are their best at their most recent.
There hasn’t been a Windows
Vista situation for either yet, and
given the yearly, iterative upgrade
patterns of both, it’s reassuringly
unlikely to happen any time soon.
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Of course you’ll get the cleanest possible Oreo
with a Pixel, and while I like the minimalist look, many
prefer the slick 21st century skin of Samsung. But
Google has indulged the fashion for white ’n’ clean
and it’s a smart move. The dark greys in the menus of
Nougat are gone in favour of white with blue accents.
This gives it a fresher feel, and the newly uncluttered
Settings app, while slightly trickier to navigate with
fewer main options, is now less of a mineield with
more options grouped into fewer initial categories.
Even if you tap into a setting category, there is
still further to tap sometimes with a little drop down
menu for more advanced options. It makes sense, but
coming from Nougat will take a little getting used to.
Other than this, Oreo largely looks the same – a
new lick of paint as opposed to a
full renovation.
Notiications
If Nougat brought more realized
notiication design, then Oreo
improves it with little quirks
that aren’t exclusively for power
users. An example is the ability
to snooze notiications with
a left swipe, making sure you
don’t fully swipe it away. Tap the
cog and set when you want the
reminder to ping back up again;
in 15 minutes, 30 minutes, one
hour or two hours. You can also
undo: see right screenshot.
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This is surprisingly useful,
particularly to set reminders
for speciic emails and IMs and
is a good addition to general
Android housekeeping.
The notiication shade is of-
white now instead of grey, and
pulling it fully down gives you
quick launch icons on the bottom
to switch Google account user,
Settings, or to edit the order of
the command icons.
Persistent notiications are
now smaller and subtler and sit
at the foot of the list, while an
excellent little animation lets the
notiication icons pop into their
relevant panels when expanded, or low into the
lower bar when out of view so you can glance at
the icons that usually sit in the status bar down at
the bottom of the shade. It’s a thoughtful and some
might say unnecessary addition, but I loved it and
it makes total sense.
This is in tandem with the granular controls now
aforded to apps with notiication channels, whereby
you can mute certain types of notiication from an app
you don’t want to tailor your experience accordingly.
Picture in Picture
One of the biggest draws for Oreo in Google’s
marketing of it is picture in picture, a clunky way
of saying pop up. If you’re running a video on your
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phone in full screen and hit the home button, you’ll
return to the home screen with a small pop up of
the video still playing.
You can swipe down for it to disappear or, as is
intended, continue watching uninterrupted while you
do something else. This is great if you want to reply
to text or check the timeline without stopping a video
(you millennial multitasker, you).
It works well from Chrome, and it’s easy to
drag round the screen, or tap to enlarge it slightly.
But you’d assume it was great in YouTube right?
Unfortunately Google has decided that is a privilege
reserved for subscribers to YouTube Red.
Not only this, but even if you sign up to Red,
which is $9.99 per month, PiP is limited to the US,
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Australia, South Korea, Mexico
and New Zealand. Sorry UK. I ind
this pretty annoying considering
the emphasis Google put on its
inclusion in Oreo, only to exclude
it from the Google-owned video
app that most people use.
If you can get over that, then
PiP works great, and even in split
screen mode though juggling
three windows on the 5in Pixel
is a laughably terrible idea that
I indulged in.
Tasty treats
A more useful thing for most
people is autoill for passwords. If
you’re logged into your Chrome
account and that account
has passwords saved, the
corresponding apps (if updated)
sync with the data to autoill the
forms if you’ve not yet signed in. It
works well, but not every app on
your phone will support it.
There’s also more intelligent
suggestions when highlighting text.
For example, highlight an address,
and the pop up menu will show
‘Maps’ before ‘cut’ or ‘copy’. And
those addresses should now be
easier to select thanks to smart
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text selection, as Oreo is cleverer
at detecting an entire address in
a block of text and selecting it all,
though I found this inconsistent.
I found these features to work
well, but not always. There are
still a few bugs to be ironed out
in OTA updates, but it’s brilliant to
see Google implementing whole
OS changes to interaction and
encouraging developers to get on
board. It seems to be working.
Another neat touch by Google
is adaptive icons. With developer
mode enabled you can change
compatible icons to display as
default, square, rounded square,
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