4.4 KitKat is the latest version of Google’s Android operating system. KitKat 4.4.3 is the latest patch to it. It’s going to start rolling out today to select devices. All clear? Great! Let’s have a look at the four key changes which are set to arrive on a handset near you.
Bye-bye battery drain
It turns out that Android 4.4 introduced a bug which causes devices with Qualcomm processors to experience severely increased battery drain when using the camera app. That’s pretty bad. The 4.4.3 patch fixes that. That’s good!
The dialer isn’t so depressing anymore
It speaks volumes about the direction technology has taken in our modern society when the telephone function is one of the last things that Google decides to fix on its telephone-oriented operating system. Still, after being virtually unchanged since Android 3.0 Honeycomb, the dialer is finally receiving an update. A new colour scheme to better fit the overall theme of Android in its current state and a couple of typically Googlish design tweaks are the order of the day.
Your friends are easier on the eye
‘People’, the default Android contacts/address book application, is also going to look a little more interesting. If you’ve ever used Gmail on your device then it’ll be a familiar sight – where you used to be dealt a plain grey square with a generic silhouette for contacts without a linked image, you’re now given a colourful square with a white initial inside of it (which corresponds to the contact’s name). That’s basically the extent of the tweak, but it’s welcome nonetheless.
Bug swatting
Finally, as you would expect from any software patch, various miscellaneous bugs have been fixed. Exactly which bugs we couldn’t say. In fact there’s set to be a whole changelog to be detailed by Google, but they’ve declined to release it as yet. So until then we’ll just have to use our imagination. This update was never likely to be the largest, so the fact that there’s been three clear-cut changes is satisfactory to us. We’ll let you know of any more interesting changes as we learn of them.
