ISSUE 46 • ANDROID ADVISOR 19REVIEWnotification shade down. As well
as the tidied-up menus in Oreo,
the Pixel 2 has an improved
always on display with new font,
notification icons and a cool
‘now playing’ feature that can
tell what music is playing around
you from an offline library of
about 10,000 tracks.
It’s another example of
Google using its obscene
mine of data to bring another
nice-to-have feature to its
polished vision of Android.
Where other manufacturers tack
things on needlessly, Google
refinements have an air of
effortless about them.
And for the record, it got
Fleetwood Mac, Badly Drawn
Boy and Green Day first time,
but not, to the irritation of my alternative-minded
colleague, I Am Kloot. I’ll let the phone off though.
Notification dots don’t fully work yet on phones
like the Sony Xperia XZ1 but work flawlessly here,
though I still find long pressing apps to see shortcuts
unintuitive. Apple does it better, where you keep your
thumb held down to scroll up the menu. I instinctively
do it on the Pixel, but that drags the icon away for
repositioning, so I don’t use it.
One thing that Google has quietly changed from
the original Pixel is to limit its unlimited storage for
Music playing on Google Pixel
2 uses the colours of album
artwork in the notification