Google last week officially announced October 4 as the date they will unveil its much anticipated Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones which be running on the company’s latest Android OS, Android 7.1 Nougat, and do away with the Nexus brand.
Asides from that, a recent tweet by Hiroshi Lockheimer, SVP Android, Chrome OS & Play at Google indicated that there might be something even much bigger in the offing at least, speculation has begun on this front.
According to Android Police, the tweet may be referring to the much-rumored and oft-denied project reportedly code-named ‘Andromeda‘ at Google, which is said to be an attempt to push Android onto the laptop and convertible form factor.
We announced the 1st version of Android 8 years ago today. I have a feeling 8 years from now we’ll be talking about Oct 4, 2016.
— Hiroshi Lockheimer (@lockheimer) September 24, 2016
The company is now expected to tease or unveil Andromeda at its October 4 event, while the launch will still be sometime next year, Android Police reports.
9to5Google also reports a citing an unnamed person who claims that the Andromeda is being tested on the two-year-old Nexus 9 tablet. The publication has also several mentions of Andromeda within the Android 7.0 Nougat AOSP source code.
One of these mentions thought to be a tool to measure graphics performance shows that Andromeda requires a device with a graphic performance score of at least 8.0, which is quite above the Android requirement of 4.0. While testing Andromeda on HTC Nexus 9, the score went up to 8.8 a score that is above Google’s own minimum requirements.[related-posts]
Another mention, “Detect Andromeda devices by having free-form window management feature,” specifically mentioning one of Android 7.0 Nougat’s highlight features.
Source: Gadgets 360 News
