On 24^th June Sundar Pichai, the senior vice president of Android, chrome & apps made a bundle of announcements during his keynote at Google I/O event of this year.  Whether it’s about Android wear or android auto or android TV or Project ARA, all the announcements had one common theme i.e. Android.

He showed the next version of android, android 5.0 aka android L. This time Google broke the trend of keeping the name of their android releases on some dessert. It made me little sad because as an Indian I was desperately hoping for the name ‘Laddu’.  But after seeing what this new version of android brings to the table I realized that it is sweetest of all.

A visual overhaul which was long overdue since the Android 4.0 Ice cream sandwich (released in December 16, 2011) is came with this version. But that’s not all, the Android L comes with a lot of functionality changes also. Here is my list of top 5 changes.

1.Lock Screen: The first change you will notice in Android L is the lock screen. It’s more functional now than it has ever been.

 Lock screen is now greets you with tiled notification which are readable without unlocking the phone also you can reply to your messages, tweets, Facebook feeds from there itself. Swiping up will take you to the home screen, swiping left will open the camera app and swiping right will bring the dialer. So this way google made the android lock screen more useful and kind of ‘iOS’ style.  But still it’s pretty good feature to use.

2. Notification Bar:  Notification bar is completely transparent now. And when you pull it down it maintains its transparent backgrounds.

So this way it remains out of the focus and allows you to focus on notification. Again you can take any action on notification like reply or dismiss from here. To reach the quick setting you’ll again have to pull down the notification bar. It may sound tricky but once you get used of it, you will realize how much better it is from two finger swiping down. Also it makes the notification bar a lot neater.

3. Material:  Android L came up with the new guidelines about visual design which makes complete android experience lot clean and natural.

Google likes to call it ‘Material’. It’s one of the biggest change of this new edition. Now every application window have some depth of feel in it. Animation looks more natural as they seems to come from somewhere and go away somewhere else instead of simply appearing and disappearing. Also these animation have 60 fps frame rate so they look quite smooth.

 4.     New Icon Set: Android L has a new set of icons. These icons look familiar but flatter and less saturated. So you won’t feel lost and same time they won’t take away your attention from content. Keyboard is also changed to look more flat and less gray in order to match with the overall theme of the new android.

 5. Multitasking:  Multitasking in android now looks really like multitasking.  You can see what’s going on every open window unlike the screen shots in previous versions. Switching between one App to another App is super smooth now. So Android L seems to take full advantage of modern powerful hardware and makes multitasking fun.

Apart from these features android L comes with other features like surrounding aware unlocking. If you are wearing your android smart watch then you phone won’t ask for password. You can start any task like writing a mail or listening a song on one device and resume the same on another form factor device like table or chrome book. It’s more like the continuity feature of iOS But very useful.

Only catch with this version is that right now only developer preview is available. So you’ll have to wait little longer to witness the Android L on your mobile screen also it’s on the mercy of your cellphone manufacturer. So if you are lucky you’ll get this new update in future or if you are impatient and nexus owner and love to take the risk of running unstable software you can go ahead with rooting and installing this new version.