After weeks of rumors and speculations one of the latest important release of the year was made official: Google announced the newest Android 4.4 KitKat and Nexus 5 smartphone.
Nexus 5 continues the tradition of Nexus design and it’s just slight different than Nexus 4. It’s all made by a silky plastic and as usual the battery is non-removable. The phone itself is slimmer and lighter than the previous version.
The screen is bigger, 5-inches and it’s 1080p(445 ppi) which should deliver crisp gorgeous images. It’s protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3, which means it should be durable.
As we all know from the leaks, Nexus 5 is built on LG G2 specifications, which are high-end and can rival any smartphone right now. So can Nexus 5 with Android 4.4 KitKat on board.
The phone comes with a Snapdragon 800 processor which is cloaked at 2.3 Ghz and it’s quad-core. It also has 2 GB of RAM and on top of this it supports 4G LTE. On the back of the phone it’s an 8 megapixel OIS camera which we all hope will finally make a difference.
Nexus 5 is now available starting $349 for the 16 GB version and $399 for the 32 GB version in two colors black and white on Google Play store or T-Mobile stores. More stores are coming soon, so don’t panic.
Now let’s talk a bit about Android 4.4 KitKat. For start the only bad thing about Android 4.4 so far is that it won’t come for Galaxy Nexus. Besides this it does come with some interesting tweaks and improvements here and there.
For start it uses less RAM (requiring just 512MB) which is amazing, but this doesn’t mean we should officially expect this to run on older phones. I personally think that for Android custom software this is awesome because we all know that with different mods you can install a newer version of Android on an older phone that officially didn’t support it. So yes, for those familiar with mods like CyanogenMod should wait for Android 4.4 KitKat with a lot of excitement.
At first, Android 4.4 brings improvements over Google Now, which will now dig more inside mobile apps to find relevant information for you. Speech recognition is also improved and Google Now can be waken up and used by just saying “Ok Google”, similar with Moto X. Google also promises that the speech recognition engine makes 25 percent fewer word errors than last year version.
The dialer was also changed a bit and it now includes information out from the web, just like you were using a Yellow Page. This allows to search a business/person and dial their number from the dialer without having to search for it in other places(Google, etc.) which is quite cool actually.
Hangouts also gets deeper integration and will integrate SMS starting Android 4.4 KitKat. Don’t worry, if you don’t like it you can still use the default texting app for your SMS.
Another small improvement is the built-in support for step counter sensors, which means that your phone can act as a pedometer without requiring app developers to build an algorithm that will detect a step taken. For example, the new Nexus 5 has those sensors built in and it can fully take advantage of this new feature. There will be also an improved API for IR blasters, that will help manufacturers build gadgets that can control easily TVs and other equipments. And starting Android 4.4 KitKat we can also have the feature that would let us capture a video of what we are doing with our devices and store it in MP4 format.
Other than these, Google says that “Android 4.4 introduces platform support for hardware sensor batching, a new optimization that can dramatically reduce power consumed by ongoing sensor activities” which normally should improve the battery life.
Source: Google Blog, Android
