Google IO 2015 News & Android M Release Date, Features & Rumors: 'Doze' Battery Saving Feature Ups Battery Life by Twice As Much As Android Lollipop Standby
Now that most top-of-the-line Android smartphones are updated to Android Lollipop, it's time for the next Android update -- tentatively called Android M, for now -- to start taking shape. And it has, as one major feature has already slipped from Android M previews at Google I/O, and it's shaping up to be an incredible step forward in battery life across Android smartphones.
The feature, called "doze," was previewed during the Google IO 2015 keynote this week, and it promises to extend the life of every Android smartphone lucky enough to get Android M when its consumer release date rolls around later this year.
Basically, "doze" is an advanced system idle state that turns off background apps and shuts down other ongoing processes. It means some of your apps might not stay as up to date as they have in the past, but that one sacrifice comes with a big upside, as Phandroid reported on Thursday: approximately twice the battery life.
Not only that, but Doze on Android M reportedly gets so close to a near-off state that it will double the battery life of an Android device not compared to an active, running Android phone, but compared to Android Lollipop on standby, which is quite a feat.
It does that by using motion detection to determine if you've left the device for an extended period of time. Think: your tablet you left on the table during your work day.
And while doze will put your tablet or smartphone into a deep, power-saving sleep, it's called doze, rather than coma, for a reason: alarms, phone calls and priority incoming messages will still quickly wake the system back up, without a boot process to wait for.
It's the first major feature of Android M we've heard of so far, but is it ever a good one.
Of course, we'll be finding more about Android M now that Google I/O 2015 is in full steam and developer previews are scheduled to start rolling out throughout June and July, in anticipation of a final consumer release date sometime in Q3 of 2015 -- so stick with Latin Post Tech for all the latest!
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