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Android Oreo Go edition
We have been facing questions from our readers on the impending Oreo updates for Nokia 2 and Nokia 3. While Nokia 3 already got the taste of Oreo Beta thanks to the Nokia Beta Labs, Nokia 2 users have been left high and dry in the process.
While HMD promised the Oreo 8.1 update for Nokia 2 as coming within 2 weeks after MWC 2018, it hasn’t lived up to the promise so far. But HMD has not forgotten Nokia 2 and Nokia 3 and both the devices may have the taste of Android Oreo very soon.
Juho Sarvikas, HMD CPO has posted tweets making it clear that the “value” Nokia devices will get major updates soon.
In a second tweet, he did mention that Nokia 2 Oreo update is being reviewed daily as he deems it “super important”.
So, hopefully, it happens “super-early” and as we have seen in the case of Nokia 1, Android Oreo 8.1 does bring performance improvements for low-RAM devices like Nokia 2.
Jio Reliance‘s JioPhone is the first feature phone to receive support for the Google Assistant, the Indian division of the Alphabet-owned company announced Tuesday. The new version of the firm’s artificial intelligence companion is officially launching in India today and supports both English and Hindi, marking the first expansion of the Google Assistant to devices that aren’t generally considered “smart.” While the newly introduced service is a heavily streamlined revision of the actual Google Assistant, its core functionality is still here, with the platform being meant to provide users with a highly intuitive method for searching the World Wide Web. Voice-enabled queries and support for countless data services are just one of many reasons Google believes its new offering will prove to be useful to Indian consumers, with the company suggesting that many functionalities found in the initial feature phone port of the Google Assistant were designed for first-time Internet users.
Among other things, JioPhone owners can have the Google Assistant help them send text messages, make phone calls, search the Internet, play multimedia files, and launch any apps they might have installed on their device. The Mountain View, California-based tech giant didn’t provide many details on how the new iteration of the Google Assistant came to be and it remains to be seen what its practical limits are. The wording of the company’s announcement indicates that Internet of Things compatibility isn’t part of the package, i.e. the newly introduced service likely can’t be used for controlling one’s smart home devices.
The KaiOS powering the JioPhone has a proven track record with voice-enabled assistants as it already features support for Jio’s own HelloJio. The operating system itself is essentially a fork of Firefox OS that’s not only used by Jio but has also been featured on Alcatel’s OneTouch Go Flip and the Intex-made Turbo+ 4G. It’s currently unclear whether other KaiOS-powered offerings will eventually receive Google Assistant support and if Google is looking into more feature phone candidates that could host its digital companion. The new revision of the Google Assistant was announced at Google India’s latest New Delhi event which also saw the introduction of Android Oreo (Go Edition) for low-end mobile devices.
Google has made public the first release of Android Go—the optimized version of Android for low-end phones targeted toward developing markets, which was announced in May at I/O 2017. Rather than let OEMs stick to outdated Android versions when shipping budget phones, Android Go brings a full, up-to-date experience for devices which ship with 512MB or 1GB RAM.
According to the release announcement, Android Go is centered around three pillars for improving usability for low-end devices. First, the base ROM for Oreo Go is about half the size of a full Nougat ROM on the same hardware. Second, the Go apps suite—a lite replacement for the standard Google apps suite—uses half as much space as well. Google claims that this doubles the available space on a phone that has only 8GB storage on board. Last, Play Store Go will showcase apps intended for low-end devices, like Facebook Messenger Lite.
Google also notes that the Go apps are designed for "lighter updates." While the Play Store has long supported delta updates, it is unclear if this means less frequent or just smaller updates for these apps. Android Go has a number of data-saving and storage-conscious features, including a data saver for the entire OS, a Chrome-specific data saver for viewing webpages, and a file manager and storage cleaner in Files Go, which also exits beta today.
Android Go also brings support for Google Assistant to low-end phones. Previously, Assistant was only available on phones which had more than 1.4 GB RAM.
Because Android Go implementation rests with device makers, the complete experience will not be available until low-end devices begin to ship with Android 8.1. Individual apps, like Files Go, can be installed separately, and are usable on non-Go edition devices.
