Here are the 9 best features in Android O (Part 1)

Google released a developer version of Android O, and here are some of our favorite features and why you should actually care.

1. Battery life

Improving the battery life is one of the biggest and most welcomed features of Android O. Similar to iOS, Android O will limit and manage what apps do in the background while multiple apps are open.

This is one of those “behind the curtain” features that you’ll appreciate even if you can’t see exactly how it works. For example, if you are using Instagram but have Google Maps open in the background, location services will update the location less frequently for Maps to keep it from draining your battery as fast.

2. Notifications channels

Notifications have always been one of the perennial strong features of Android. In O, you can group your notifications into channels or as Google describes it: “app-defined categories for notification content”. So if you had a channel of apps that are all “news” related, you could interact and control notification settings for all the apps in the news channel at once.

3. Snooze notifications

Sometimes as wonderful as notifications are, you just need them to be quiet for a little while. Android O gives you the ability to snooze notifications simply by sliding your finger across a notification and then selecting how long to snooze it for: 15, 30 or 60 minutes.

4. Picture-in-picture

While we’ve seen picture-in-picture video for the iPad, we’ve yet to see it fully functioning on a phone. Android O brings the ability to keep a video playing while interacting with another app. To what extent this feature is incorporated by video apps like Netflix and HBO Now remains to be seen. But hopefully you’ll be able to keep watching “Game Of Thrones” as you check the weather to see if winter is indeed coming. (Spoiler: It is.)

Source : https://www.cnet.com