I've been running the Android P early release candidate (DP4/Beta 3) for a couple of days now, and actually it's in pretty good - perfectly smooth and responsive, just one app so far that doesn't work with it. But amongst the obvious look and feel changes I'm finding that it's little touches that make the big difference to me:
1) the new "rotate screen" button: if you have auto-rotate off and change the screen orientation while in an app that supports rotation, a little "rotate" button appears on the nav bar. Touch it if you want to rotate, ignore it if you don't.
As someone who normally keeps auto-rotate off because I get annoyed by unwanted rotations if I use the phone while lying down, this is brilliant. I think I'll probably never need the auto-rotate again. It also solves the problem of those odd photos where auto-rotate gets the orientation wrong, because you can easily just choose the one you want.
2) touching the fingerprint scanner now acts like touching the display to keep it awake. That may sound trivial, but it's the one thing that's driven me crazy with the Pixel 2: you use the scanner to wake it, you can swipe it to raise and lower the notifications, but if the screen starts to time out touching the scanner, which for me was an instinctive response, does nothing - it just times out. And then you have to touch the scanner to wake it! Finally 9.0 seems to have fixed this - something I discovered when, despite 9 months of it not working, I once again touched the scanner when the screen started to dim...
Otherwise it mostly works the same, even if it looks different. I prefer the new recent apps switcher style (I never really like the rolodex), and like that you can set a dark style even with a light wallpaper (even if it only affects the shade). The "outline" style of the VPN icon is the main regression as far as I'm concerned. It's certainly good enough to be a daily driver for me (though I've read that Google Pay, which I don't use, can be problematic). So I don't think I'll be going back to Oreo.
1) the new "rotate screen" button: if you have auto-rotate off and change the screen orientation while in an app that supports rotation, a little "rotate" button appears on the nav bar. Touch it if you want to rotate, ignore it if you don't.
As someone who normally keeps auto-rotate off because I get annoyed by unwanted rotations if I use the phone while lying down, this is brilliant. I think I'll probably never need the auto-rotate again. It also solves the problem of those odd photos where auto-rotate gets the orientation wrong, because you can easily just choose the one you want.
2) touching the fingerprint scanner now acts like touching the display to keep it awake. That may sound trivial, but it's the one thing that's driven me crazy with the Pixel 2: you use the scanner to wake it, you can swipe it to raise and lower the notifications, but if the screen starts to time out touching the scanner, which for me was an instinctive response, does nothing - it just times out. And then you have to touch the scanner to wake it! Finally 9.0 seems to have fixed this - something I discovered when, despite 9 months of it not working, I once again touched the scanner when the screen started to dim...
Otherwise it mostly works the same, even if it looks different. I prefer the new recent apps switcher style (I never really like the rolodex), and like that you can set a dark style even with a light wallpaper (even if it only affects the shade). The "outline" style of the VPN icon is the main regression as far as I'm concerned. It's certainly good enough to be a daily driver for me (though I've read that Google Pay, which I don't use, can be problematic). So I don't think I'll be going back to Oreo.
