This was an unacceptable failure on Google’s part and caused a lot of people to miss out on purchasing the latest Pixel phone.įor those who did manage to complete the purchase (I got lucky), everything started out great. And when the big day came, the ability to actually purchase a device was marred by non-functioning shopping carts, website errors and zero accountability. The lead-up to the big day was pretty much devoid of marketing. It’s powerful, beautiful and the camera is astonishing.īut it wasn’t (and hasn’t been) all unicorns and lollipops for the Pixel device.
The Pixel 6 is a brilliant device (with a few issues). This was an important (and necessary) step forward for Google.Īnd, for the most part, it did.
With this latest release, non-white faces will see more accurate representations of darker skin color and natural hair. Another very important improvement in Android 12 was that the developers and designers finally put in some effort to fix the skin tone problems for the camera.
The new features added to Android 12 included scrolling screenshots, AppSearch, One-Handed mode, rich content insertion, overview suggestions, more gesture controls, haptic feedback with audio, unused apps, Game Mode, HEVC media transcoding, AVIF image support, multi-channel audio, optimizations for non-standard displays, universal splash screens, Privacy Dashboard, mic and camera indicators, mic and camera kill switches, approximate location permission and Android Compute Core. Although one of the most important changes to the platform will get its own subhead (more on that in a bit), there was so much improvement going on with the OS: This release wound up (for many, including myself) to be the best take on Android to have ever been released. We have to start this out with the 12th iteration of the Android operating system. Let’s dive in and look at a few of the highlights and some of the lowlights for the year the time forgot.