As expected, 3 September is the day when Google officially released the final version of Android 10 for Pixel smartphone owners and will expand to partner devices in the coming weeks.
The search giant has followed Apple’s mantra of rolling out software upgrades for its phone simultaneously for all its users across the globe.
Google is famous for naming each of its Android versions after a dessert but with Android 10 that trend has been put to bed, once and for all. Google claims that Android Q will keep security and privacy as its central focus. It has nearly 50 new features focused on security and privacy.
How to get Android 10 Update on Pixel Phone
- Go to Settings on your Pixel phone
- Click on System and tap on Advanced
- From there, click on System Update and check for latest version
- Start installing if the Android 10 update shows up
If your phone was running on Android Q Beta, the size of the update ranges between 5.5MB and 6.5MB. But if you’re installing the version from scratch, the update size is over 1188MB or 1.2GB in total.
Now, we’ve already got a taste of the features of Android 10 with its beta version and here’s a quick look at what’s new with this flavour.
Smart Replies
Smart Reply, is now built into the notification system in Android, allowing any messaging app to suggest replies in notifications. Smart Reply can also predict your next action. For instance, if someone sends you an address, it will automatically open in Google Maps if you tap it.
Dark Theme
The other big feature that’s coming to Android Q is Dark Mode. This will help save battery life on the phone by lighting up less number of pixels on the screen. It’s also much easier on the eyes. It will be available by default on Android Q. Third party apps like WhatsApp is yet to enter the dark side, but hopefully that’ll happen soon.
We’re going to be using Android 10 on dark mode to see if it makes a difference to the battery life of the phone.
Live Captions
Another interesting feature of Android Q is Live Caption. The text-to-speech and speech-to-text engine is an extension of its Live transcribe function that’s already available in about 70 languages.
With one click you can turn on captions for a web video or podcasts or even for a live video you are shooting. This even works off-line. As soon as speech is detected, it starts live-captioning the video.
Google is also exploring how this technology can capture phone calls. It can help those who are hearing or speech impaired. This new technology is called Live Relay.
More For User Privacy
In the privacy section under Settings, you can find a new Location section that gives you more transparency and control over the location data you share with apps. You can now choose to share location data with apps only while they’re in use. This dialog box will appear every time an app like Swiggy or Uber asks for your location access.
Users can also choose to randomise their MAC address of the device so that it will difficult for malware to track you.
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