Android 17 Is the Biggest Upgrade in Years

So, Google just had a keynote and they've announced possibly the single biggest shakeup to the smartphone in the last 5 years. In one go, they've unveiled Gemini Intelligence, so you can ask AI to start taking over your phone and doing things for you. That's cool. Android 17, which has ended up far more eventful than the previous few versions. There's a new Android Auto that somehow out of nowhere is the actual highlight of the show. All finished off with an entirely new category of laptop that lets you wiggle your cursor and do magic AI things. Put it this way, it is making Apple software look very depressing by comparison. So, first things first, Gemini Intelligence lets you do five things that you haven't been able to properly do before, like Rumbler. So, you know when you're dictating a message, which I do all the time, and then you ramble while dictating that message, which I also do all the time. Rambler is a new feature that fixes you. So, let's say that your wife asks you how much you enjoyed her dinner, and you say it's a bit dry. Actually, no way. I love it. I've never had canned beans like this in my life. This will no longer type out your entire inner monologue. It'll smartly realize what you're trying to say. Or at least that's what Google claims. I'll be the test of that. And it also means if you do accidentally tell your wife her food was dry, you can then say, "One, buy flowers, two, buy chocolates, three, eat the beans and nod." And your phone will realize by itself that you're describing a list and format that into one. And then you can say, "Swap the numbers for emoji." It'll get there. Or even, I guess, turn this whole message into Hindi so she can't read it. This is really useful and it actually makes me feel like one of the Flintstones when I look at this and then I look at my iPhone's current dictation quality or another struggle that we can all relate to, autofill. I mean, don't get me wrong, the feature itself is one of humanity's top five inventions. But every now and again, you will come across a site or an app where the rigid way that autofill has been programmed means it just doesn't activate. and the pain that you feel then having to manually type out each letter of that ridiculous email address you made when you were 14 years old knowing how easy this could have been. Point being, Gemini intelligence should be the cure forever. It taps into your personal intelligence pocket, basically everything the AI knows about you, including those random bits you're never going to remember like your passport details. And then it smartly fills out every form. And it should have a higher success rate doing so because unlike traditional autofill which is just interpreting code. So if a site is not coded well it might not realize what data it's meant to fill in where. Gemini like you can read and understand what's being asked of it. Seriously fantastic. That sounds like I'm being sarcastic. I'm actually gassed. I've never been happier. So, it feels like part of Gemini intelligence is very much focused on giving people what they want, fixing common pain points, but ones that have actually required this new level of intelligence to solve. But part of this update is also improving things that you didn't even know needed improving. Like, for example, you can now build widgets by literally asking for them. They've made it look so easy that this is possibly the first time ever I can safely say my granddad could be a programmer. The example they give is a custom countdown to a marathon that you're running. But I think it would be so cool to make one that can pop up with activities happening around you, but based on the time right now and your specific GPS location. Another example of something that I'm not sure people were specifically asking for is app automations. They showed an example of you taking a photo of this flyer about a tour that you wanted to go on, but then asking Gemini, find me a tour like this, but make sure it can accommodate six people. And now Gemini is able to first figure out what you mean, then take that information to another app like Expedia. It looks like it at this point kind of thinks in the background till it's finished, and then finally pings you a notification to see the result. You click that, that's your booking page. I do like that it doesn't try and book for you. That would scare me. Do I think I would use this? Probably not for a while, to be honest. Call me old-fashioned, but I still think there's a lot of benefit to you looking at things like this yourself. You know, you might find a tour that's better rated or closer to your hotel or just something that you'd actually rather do instead. Like the way I see it, you and these five other people are going to spend maybe a full day doing this tour. Do you trust the AI enough that you don't want to even spend five minutes checking yourself for other options? I'll pass. I will say this kind of task doing can become more useful when you add in that Gemini can now also pick up the full context of what's on your screen. So let's say you're kind of interested in going to this standup comedy night, but you just cannot be bothered to plan the logistics around it. Here you can say to Gemini, "Sort my parking space and rest somewhat easy knowing that it can read all of the context that it needs by itself from your screen without you needing to spell it out." And this is probably the most visual example of how Gemini is evolving into more of an agent with this update. Like you're actually seeing it tap and type things one step at a time completely without your intervention. I could so imagine just watching Gemini jaw clenched as it confidently books me an eighth floor spot when I can see that there's three free on the first. But in principle, this is a level up cuz like last week I made a schedule of which supplements I wanted to take at which points in the day. Yeah, I get it. I'm 30 now. Magnesium is exciting. Gemini intelligence in theory means that I could hold the power button while looking at the schedule and ask Gemini to turn it into a set of reminders to make sure that I follow this routine. That's seriously helpful. Or let's say you have your shopping list loaded up. In theory, you could just bring up Gemini and say, "Buy all of this." And before you know it, you'll be sitting there with a basket full of these products ready for you to hit check out. They did also show how you could be browsing an article and then ask Gemini to make an infographic summarizing it. Obviously, it worked, but I wasn't super impressed with the result. It kind of screams AI from 2 years ago. Overall, though, Gemini Intelligence feels pretty bang on. The main caveat is just availability. Like, a lot of this isn't coming now. It's starting to roll out this summer. It's not coming all at once. Each feature is going to be released when it's ready, they're saying. And to be honest, even when it does come, it's coming to Samsung and Google phones first, seemingly also only to the flagship versions of them, potentially because it relies on a more powerful version of the Gemini Nano model, which needs to run on the device itself. Point being, it could be a year before your phone gets this, if at all. But at least Google is being clear about that. I think they're specifically trying not to overpromise and fall into the same trap that Apple did with Apple intelligence. Thankfully, the next Android update, Android 17, is for all. And even if you took Gemini Intelligence aside, I actually think what they've done with it is incredibly clever. For example, you must have seen by this point people posting this screen reaction type of content. Well, now Google is adding the ability to create this screen reaction content instantly. It'll record your screen. It'll use your front camera to record you. It'll keep you in the right position and cut away your background. Having all of that happening at once in real time is a very efficient way to produce videos. And on the pro end of the spectrum, they're also bringing Adobe Premiere to Android in summer with templates specifically designed for you to make YouTube shorts easily. You can see why this works out for Google. But it makes sense why they're focusing on this because the iPhone basically owns the creator market currently and the creator market has a lot of influence over the mainstream market. So Google's trying to basically get the influencers on board and this thinly veiled full frontal assault on Apple continues over to Instagram. You know how for years shooting content on Instagram for Android has just been less reliable and lower quality than iPhone. It's one of the reasons I first switched away to Apple like 6 years ago. Now, Google is boldly claiming if you use a premium Android device, you're about to get at least as good, if not better looking shots than on an iPhone. They're saying that they've optimized the capture to upload pipeline so that your photos and videos lose as little quality as possible when posting them. And that even if you shoot directly within the Insta app, you'll actually get ultra high dynamic range processing, full working night mode, and built-in video stabilization. How it's taken them till 2026 to do this, I have no idea. But this could be great. I say could because we've heard this whole we fixed Instagram sentiment quite a lot, especially from Samsung over the years. But I do feel a little more confident because this is Google themselves saying that they're fixing this on a base Android level as opposed to other companies whose software sits on top and who probably have more limited control. And you might know that Instagram also has their own edits app too. Well, it's pretty cool that with Android 17, you'll now be able to use your phone's native AI to power features within that app. So, like one tap to straight up enhance photos and videos. I'm hoping this can actually upgrade the resolution as opposed to just making things look artificially bright and sharp, though. Or do you know how phones now have this audio eraser feature to understand the different sound sources in a video you've taken so that you can turn down, let's say, the wind noise specifically? Well, you can now use that capability, but within Instagram's editor, so automatically splitting up each audio track into the individual stems that made up that track. Whoever's making these decisions at Google, I think they got their head in the right place. And while they were doing all this, they've also decided to remake all the emoji on Android, literally all 4,000 of them, into 3D. But, okay, my favorite part of this new Android, though, is pause point. You can tell that this year specifically, Google's really looked at what else is out there and thought, how do we bring this into Android itself, like the new Rambler feature is very similar to a lot of the new AI dictation apps that have been popping up. Create my widget very inspired by nothing's essential apps feature. And pauseoint is functionally identical to an app called One sec that I've been paying like $20 a year for. The idea is you just set up a few apps that you find distracting and the next time you try and open those apps, it will ask you to stop and breathe for 10 seconds. Sounds silly, but it's incredible. That 10 seconds gives you a chance to decide either you didn't really need to use the app and you close it, that you actually should instead be doing something more useful, in which case you can get it to redirect you to say your meditation app or three that you really did need to use the app in question and you proceed. I found by using one sec that even just triggering that thought means you're probably going to be a bit more purposeful about your use of this app instead of just mindlessly doom scrolling before your brains even realize what's happening. I do feel bad for the one set company. They specifically say on their site we're a small independent team. We're not affiliated with big corporations which makes me think that Google didn't exactly buy them or ask permission to take their feature. But ultimately this is still probably good for users. like everyone's going to get the feature. You get it for free and because it's now baked into Android, it's going to feel a little slicker to use, too. Now, here's what was really not on my bingo card today. Android Auto actually being the star of the entire show. Because I mean, for starters, all the new Android and Gemini intelligence features, if you have them on your phone, you get them on your car, too. And if you think about it, the car while you're completely occupied is where it's most important to have an assistant that can do things for you. Like if you're on your way home, being able to just say, "Order me my usual food from Door Dash." And within 5 seconds, your car is on the checkout page waiting on you to confirm. That feels very much like the future. And if Apple doesn't very quickly pull Siri out of whatever Certino basement she's been chained up in since like 2014, I think it's going to make the gap between these assistants too wide to ignore. And that's just the start. Google Maps is now about to have immersive 3D navigation. The idea is that your view looking at the map will more closely match your view looking out the actual window. You'll be able to see the same buildings, the overpasses, and it should be able to better highlight which lane you need to be in. This is a million miles more intuitive to me than trying to squint at these things and then translate them to the road in front of you in the split second before you approach a motorway roundabout. And then they're saying that this new lane tracking will be particularly accurate on cars that support Gemini builtin. So again, this is one of those unsupported models business, but if you have a car that gets this support, then you're going to get the extra benefits of Gemini actually being trained on your car's hardware, which means that Google can use the live feed from your car's front-facing camera to know for sure what lane you're currently in. Plus, also, you can then ask Gemini, if I go and buy this TV from Samsung, will it fit in my trunk? and it will be able to answer with an awareness of the car's exact dimensions. Or I'm imagining this also means you could ask things like, "Remind me, how do I turn on my cruise control?" And it would be able to reference the manual and tell you specifically what the button looks like. The software should also look a little jazzier. Google saying the new Android Auto will adapt to all the weird and wonderful shapes of infotainment systems we've been seeing lately. that they've updated the way that individual apps look, and that your car will now get the same fonts, the same wallpapers, and the same smoother animations that the phones are now getting. Plus, widgets on the side, like a quick dialer for your most frequent contact, or a button to open your garage door as you're pulling up. kind of feels like my birthday because then for the first time ever, Google is officially supporting watching videos in your car at 1080p 60 frames pers, assuming your infotainment system supports that with Dolby Atmos audio. So, if you did tell your wife her food was dry, at least now you can get a high quality movie night for one out of it. And then to stop you trying to watch Fast and Furious while you become Fast and Furious, the videos will minimize and play just audio as soon as you start driving. What a clever little feature. It does also need you to have YouTube Premium cuz that's what enables background play. So again, you can see what Google gets out of all of this. But then they surprised us all by revealing an entirely new type of laptop, too. Not a Chromebook, not a Windows, a Google book. It's not actually super clear right now what operating system this is running, but they've got the tagline intelligence is the new spec, which um I've actually got a great video all about invented specs like intelligence, but basically this is them saying we won't be competing on actual measurable specs. The impression I get is that these Google books are not about to be a competitor to a top-end MacBook Pro for someone who wants to edit and render iMac movies on their couch. I mean, come to think of it, ultra high-end performance is just not what Google does with any of their products, really, is it? But I still think it will be a somewhat premium set of machines that leans heavily on AI, which is why they have re-imagined the cursor. Now, you can wiggle it, which will put it into AI mode and let you do smart things like you select a bunch of images and AI will fuse them together in front of you. They're saying that every Google book, doesn't matter which company manufactures it, is going to have this multicolored light strip, which I assume is its way of indicating that it's doing intelligence. Plus, some of the new features from Android are also getting carried over, like you can generate your own widgets on Google Book. And this looks like by far the most seamless way I've seen to access your phone and open apps from it directly without needing to pick the thing up. with probably the coolest thing being that your Android phone storage can become accessible on your Google book as if it were part of the Google book storage. So transferring something from your phone to your Google book would just be go into one folder and pull that file into another. Past experience tells us that there is a broad range for how terrible or great this could end up being. But as far as I'm concerned, if Google can make sure that Google Books get close to the build quality and the trackpad quality of the MacBook, then I would genuinely consider a full-on jump from the Apple ecosystem. I mean, I spend 98% of my time on it on Google Docs anyways. And so looking at all of this Google stuff together, while not everything is coming soon and not everything is coming to everyone, I am really happy that they seem laser focused on this mission of reducing boring admin. And I want that more than ever when I'm traveling, which is why for the last 2 years I've been using SY, our sponsor. And I just want to say that not having to think about setting up a new eSIM every time I go somewhere or god forbid doing that 45minute physical SIM card scavenger hunt before I can even Google how to get to the hotel is one of those quiet life upgrades that you didn't know you needed. 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