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Hands-on with Android O’s new user-facing features [Video]

Android O went official this morning and, as we reported earlier this month, it brings quite a few new enhancements to the table, despite perhaps appearing to be a pretty minor update at first glance. A lot of the features in this new OS are still hidden under the hood, but there’s also a lot new right on the surface. So, let’s take a look…

Android O brings along with it support for a lot of new background optimizations and tweaks that better improve the overall experience, but in this initial preview, a lot of that isn’t available for us to actually test yet. However, there are some things available on the surface that are welcome updates.

One of the most striking new changes is the settings menu, which has been completely redesigned and reorganized. Likewise, the quick settings menu has been updated with a more dense layout which allows for a bit more information to be shown at one time. Notifications also see some immediate upgrades with the ability to snooze notifications from any applications for a certain period of time to later have them return.

The system UI tuner also picks up some new capabilities such as the ability to set custom lock screen shortcuts and customize the navigation bar. Obviously, there’s a ton more in Android O, and we’ve only scratched the surface so far. You can see the things we’ve talked about here in action in the video below, and check out our continuously updating post about everything new in the first Android O developer preview.

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