The current craze of smartphones has gripped the whole world from the East to the West. We love flaunting our smartphones but often what we give improperly is the operating system on which it runs. There are three operating systems which are most popular among the smartphones – iOS, Android and Windows. Of the three, Android is the most popular OS on which 80% of the bestselling smartphones run, and the maker of Android system is none other than the tech giant Google.
Until now all the Android systems had been running on Android 4.0 Icecream Sandwich. And it had been long that this version did not see an upgrade. Hence Google (GOOG, Financial) has now come up with the next version. Let us take a closer look at the new Google offering.
Icecream Sandwich to Lollipop
It is typical of Google to name its software after food treats – previously it was Icecream sandwich and now it is the Lollipop. Google is now in the process of launching the latest version of Android OS – Android 5.0 Lollipop. After an extended testing and preview period, Google has announced the final release of its latest version of Android. Android 5.0 Lollipop is making its entry in the market on three new Nexus devices –Â the Nexus 6 smartphone, Nexus 9 tablet, and Nexus Player streaming media device and will be available on the Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 7, Nexus 10, and Google Play Edition devices within the next few weeks.
The focus area of Lollipop would be to enhance the display features, visual effect and interface changes, which Google has dubbed Material Design. The new platform offers new, more fluid animations, a cleaner design with a robust color palette, an enhanced multitasking menu and new ways to interact with your voice. A test drive of the new features of Material Design can be experienced through its own Android app such Google+ which has been updated in line with the new OS from Google. The Material Design feature is meant to unify the software's look and feel across various device form factors, whether that's a tablet, smartphone, home media streamer or any other Android-enabled media device.
Apart from enhancing the visual aspect Lollipop will also offer over 5,000 new APIs for developers to tap into and lets multiple different Android devices with various form factors work better together in perfect synch and seamlessly. Google claims that media functions such as songs, photos, apps and recent searches can be synced across various Android devices without any lag. Lollipop also includes new notification controls to limit alerts during meetings and other times, a new battery saver mode that can squeeze in 90 more minutes of life between charges, multiple user accounts, guest user modes and new ways to secure your device via trusted Bluetooth connections. It will come with an inbuilt feature that will protect the phone from accidentally resetting to factory default, thus keeping the personal settings safe, this will also make it difficult for phone thieves to use the stolen device. These features had been provided as additional protection add-ons by a few Android device makers on their own smartphones and tablets for some time, but Google is now making sure they are part of the core Android experience.
Android 5.0 Lollipop is a big release for Google –Â it's the most significant visual update in comparison to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich which was released in 2011, and it laid the foundation stone for Android to grow as a platform outside that of smartphones and tablets. Google is very clearly advocating Android as the next generation software, and it dreams that android OS would be the platform on every connected device we interact with. Lollipop is the first step to getting closer to the dream and making it into a reality.
Our understanding of Google’s new move
In our previous article on Google titled "Google - The Dark Knight In The Smartphone War,"Â we had given the vivid description of how Google is getting into the smartphone war and stacking up its position against Apple (AAPL, Financial). But the truth is that the war is not just limited to the smartphone; it has also entered operating system territory.
Within a couple of weeks of Apple launching its latest version of OS, the iOS8, Google is coming up with the latest Android version Android 5.0 Lollipop, and news of Windows 9 hitting the shelves across the globe is widespread. It looks like, after the smartphone turf, the operating system war is also accumulating considerable amount of steam. While the Windows 9 will power the latest range of Microsoft (MSFT, Financial) Lumia phones, iOS8 will be the platform for the Apple blue eyed protégée iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus and the latest iPads while the new Android 5.0 Lollipop will support all Android devices irrespective of their makers. However, deciding investment positions based on operating system performance would be a cliché and does not carry much weight while taking positions in mobile device manufacturing companies. Nevertheless, it would be interesting to watch the war between Google and Apple getting into the operating system front, and this will certainly hold about 10% to 15% in deciding our ratio of stake in the two rival companies.
