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Internet giant gearing up for full launch of latest sweet-themed smartphone platform.
Google late on Thursday revealed it has chosen ‘Nougat’ as the official, sweet-themed name of Android N, the latest edition of its smartphone OS.
Due out this summer, Nougat adds features like split-screen multitasking, so a user could continue to watch a video on YouTube while answering an email, for example. Users will also be able to reply to messages from within the notification bar instead of having to open up the corresponding application.
Other bells and whistles include an upgraded version of ‘Doze’, which puts the smartphone into sleep mode in order to prolong battery life, and ‘Daydream’, which turns any Android Nougat device – provided it has sufficiently-capable hardware – into a virtual reality headset.
The developer version of Nougat was revealed in March, two months earlier than Google’s I/O 2016 conference, which is when the company usually unveils a new edition of Android.
Although the finished version will leave the factory this summer, there is no telling when it will actually arrive on which handsets. Google’s in-house Nexus range will be expected to get it first, but other Android OEMs generally keep to their own update schedule.
