Google’s newest Android 16 beta provides a bunch of recent wallpaper and lock display screen choices for Pixel telephones, together with live-updating climate animations and a function that mechanically frames topics of photographs inside quite a lot of bubbly shapes.
When you choose a picture to make use of as a wallpaper within the beta, you possibly can faucet the sparkly assortment of starbursts that has change into the de facto image for AI options to entry the brand new results. One in every of them, “Form,” washes your display screen in a strong coloration, with a punchout body within the center centered with regards to your picture, be it an individual, animal, or object. You may select from 5 completely different form choices: a slanted oval, rounded rectangle, an arched opening, a flowery form, and a hexagon. It’s slightly just like the iOS “Depth Impact” function that partially obscures the clock in your lock display screen with an individual’s head.
Proper now, your cellphone 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 cellphone mechanically centered the body on one of many cats, with no choice to make use of the opposite as an alternative.
A brand new “Climate” choice 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 circumstances, however you possibly can choose fog, rain, snow, or solar when you’d slightly use one persistent impact. These choices be a part of the earlier “Cinematic” wallpaper mode that mechanically creates a parallax impact, shifting your topic across the background of the picture if you tilt your cellphone. That function is now activated with a toggle labeled “Add 3D movement to this picture” and produced barely completely different outcomes once 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. As an example, the beta now has a toggle for “Present seen notifications” that, when turned off, will disguise notifications you’ve already seen.
Lastly, 9to5Google noticed {that a} weblog submit from Google’s I/O convention presents a take a look at its “Stay Updates” function, which, like iOS’s Stay Actions, presents live-updating lock display screen components exhibiting you when, say, your Uber driver is arriving. Within the GIF above, you possibly can see what elements like its progress bar and time estimates will seem like.
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