Android 11 hands-on: all the features!

(upbeat music) – The beta for the nextversion of Android, which is Android 11, is available for Pixelphones starting today.

Now, a bunch of Android 11has already leaked, of course, because Google, but it's

official now.

So I wanna get into whatthe new features are.

Now, overall, my take is that Android is a mature operating system, which means that the fundamentals are really not gonna change that much.

There are a few new important features but the context here is thatAndroid already does a lot.

And so a lot of the features aren't necessarily about doing new things, but helping you makesense of all of the things that Android already does.

One of the biggest jobs thata mature operating system has is managing complexity.

So here's a question, how well does Android 11 manage all of the thingsthat Android does? So to start, every version of Android messes with notifications.

And I'm actually notcomplaining about this because notifications are ahuge source of complexity.

And I much prefer theyear-over-year changes that Google tries to makewith Android to improve it than the way that Apple does things with the iPhone, which is to almost never changeanything about notifications.

See, notifications went from a way for you to see your text messages into this nightmare, catch-all of everything.

News, and media controls, and thirsty apps tryingto get you to re-engage with their content, and alerts that apps are using your background location.

And (sighs) it's just a lot.

So in Android 11, Google is separatingout your notifications into three really clearand distinct sections with big, obvious labels.

There are Conversations, Alerting notifications, and Silent notifications.

And the new section here is Conversations, which separates out thenotifications from your chat apps into their own section at the top, and that lets you do a bunch of things with those notifications.

The first thing is you canbubble those notifications, which turns them into theselike bubble chat heads that sit on the top of other apps.

You might have seen it inapps like Facebook Messenger, where there's this head floating around, you can put it wherever you want, you tap on it, and itopens up the conversation.

That's now going to become available to any chat app on Android.

And by default, that's just gonna show like the whole chat upinside little window, but developers can customizeit for it if they want.

The other thing that theConversations lets you do is you can long press on them, and you can mark a person's conversation inside a chat app as priority.

And what that means isthey're gonna be able to break through yourdo not disturb settings.

And also when you look atyour little notification tray at the top of your screen, you're gonna see their face instead of just the icon for the app.

There are a few other newthings with notifications, so you can more easily control where silent notifications show up.

You can keep them fromshowing up in your status bar or on your lock screen.

You can easily switch an app from alerting notificationto silent notification by long pressing on it, bringing up some options.

If you wanna get an appinto a Conversations though, you gotta wait for the developer to update it to support that.

Google also took what used tobe a really weird hacky thing and they made it official.

You can go into your Settings and find your Notification history.

So in case you accidentallydismiss notification, you can go to Settings and find it again.

You also get a few more controls over how do not disturb works that lets you customize which apps are able to break through do not disturb, in addition to thosepriority conversations.

So there is one other thing to talk about with notifications.

You used to have media playback control in your notification shade, and Google's now moving thatup into the quick settings.

So it's sort of part ofthe notification shade, but sort of not, anyway, it's up there at the top now, and when you expand it down, there's gonna be a littlebutton that you can press, and when you press it, it will let you choose where your audio goes, Bluetooth headphones, or speaker or wherever.

So that's notifications.

The next interaction zonethat Google has beefed up for Android 11 is the power menu.

It's the thing that you get when you long press the powersleep wake button thing.

It has your usual poweroptions like before, Emergency, Power off, Restart.

There is lockdown but unfortunately, it's hidden under a three dot menu.

Underneath that are yourGoogle Wallet passes.

So your bank cards andyour boarding passes if you ever get to go on a plane again, that's all stuff that we've seen before.

What's new is that Google is putting smart home controlbuttons underneath that here.

So it's sort of like what the iPhone does with home controls and control center.

But on Android, it's in this power menu.

You can customize whatbuttons show up here, you can just tap on stuffto turn lights on and off, you can drag your fingerto change brightness.

You can also just long press to go in and see more options and so on.

This section is poweredby the Google Home app.

And that's good becauseit's one less thing that you have to set up.

But it does mean that I thinkthat different companies are gonna do differentthings with this power menu.

So if you buy a Samsung phone, I would expect to see Samsung Pay and Samsung Smart Homecontrols in the section here.

So that's notifications and power.

There's a couple otherzones to talk about.

There's the home screen, and one of the things you can do here is replace your dot with suggested appsfrom Android, you know, contextual guesses of whatyou're gonna want to open next.

And I've had it on andI don't really love it.

These guesses at what appI'm gonna want to open usually aren't really that accurate.

There's also the multitasking screen or you might call it the recent screen, and there's three newbuttons on the bottom here.

So if you tap screenshot, it pulls a screenshot of the app that's front most in multitasking.

You can tap Select, and it will show you what text is selectable to directlycopy in your clipboard.

Or you can tap Share, and it'll grab a screenshotof that front most app and bring up the Sharesheet automatically.