Google’s newest Android 16 beta provides a bunch of latest wallpaper and lock display screen choices for Pixel telephones, together with live-updating climate animations and a characteristic that robotically frames topics of photographs inside a wide range of bubbly shapes.
When you choose a picture to make use of as a wallpaper within the beta, you’ll be able to faucet the sparkly assortment of starbursts that has change into the de facto image for AI options to entry the brand new results. Considered one of them, “Form,” washes your display screen in a stable shade, with a punchout body within the center centered with reference to your picture, be it an individual, animal, or object. You may select from 5 totally different form choices: a slanted oval, rounded rectangle, an arched opening, a flowery form, and a hexagon. It’s a little bit just like the iOS “Depth Impact” characteristic that partially obscures the clock in your lock display screen with an individual’s head.
Proper now, your telephone picks what a part of the picture must be the topic, with no choice to resize or reposition it. In an image of two cats that my colleague Dominic Preston tried, the telephone robotically centered the body on one of many cats, with no possibility to make use of the opposite as an alternative.
A brand new “Climate” possibility interacts with the topic of your picture, like by pelting them with raindrops or wrapping them in fog. The default alternative, “Native,” modifications the impact relying on close by climate situations, however you’ll be able to decide fog, rain, snow, or solar in the event you’d relatively use one persistent impact. These choices be a part of the earlier “Cinematic” wallpaper mode that robotically creates a parallax impact, transferring your topic across the background of the picture once you tilt your telephone. That characteristic is now activated with a toggle labeled “Add 3D movement to this picture” and produced barely totally different outcomes after I tried it out with the identical picture.
Google can also be testing updates to the lock display screen, together with providing extra management over what notifications seem there. For example, the beta now has a toggle for “Present seen notifications” that, when turned off, will conceal notifications you’ve already seen.
Lastly, 9to5Google spotted {that a} blog post from Google’s I/O conference affords a have a look at its “Dwell Updates” characteristic, which, like iOS’s Dwell Actions, presents live-updating lock display screen components displaying you when, say, your Uber driver is arriving. Within the GIF above, you’ll be able to see what facets like its progress bar and time estimates will appear to be.
