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In this article, I give you my Android 9.0 Pie review with specs included. This is Android 9.0, formerly known as Android P (it got a name Pie now). It’s available on Google’s own Pixel phones, no surprise there, and on the Essential phone.

Actually, I’ve been running the Alpha builds, the pre-release builds of Android P also on this but this is the easy one to actually get the update for. No constantly checking for the update, that sort of thing. It was available right away just from the default notification. I got the update setting on the system so I just went ahead and updated it.

This is the Essential phone which was one of the first no bezel phones with a notch or more like a pinball in the case of this one. We’re gonna see more phone Android phones with notches including the Google Pixel lineup.

One of the changes for Pi is actually to move things and kind of balance the left and right stuff that’s up top so it can surround a notch. For example, the time has moved to the left side, that’s not really a big deal though.

So, this is all about gestures. Notice that the on-screen home buttons that were used to seeing, the three navigation buttons for multitasking home and back they’re gone but you can bring them back we’ll talk about that.

Android P or Pie is really all about the new gestures and they’re done really well. In fact, I like them better than the way the iPhone 10 handles them.

First off, you go and you do a kind of a long swipe and there’s your app drawer, that’s not a big surprise. If you want to go home you tap that button right there. If you do a kind of halfway, no pressing and holding, no hard force thing like you’d have to do with the iPhone here’s all the stuff that’s running very cool.

It makes things very easy if you want to just pop your streaming something and you want to switch your network connection you can just do that. Go into network settings and then come right back very easily.

You can also copy and paste between apps really smoothly and easily this way. So I think that this is just very nicely done, this carousel. And, you can also use this down here to scrub if you want instead of doing it on the phone screen. I find it fine on the phone screen again we do have a back button here still which is interesting.

I have disabled automatic rotation because most of the time I find I’m moving the phone around it rotates when I don’t want to. What if I wanted to view this web page or whatever the content was in landscape mode?

There’s nothing to see here is there. But once you turn the phone sideways even though I have it disabled you notice that it see pops up right here and I can actually temporarily override it and shift it to landscape mode which is a nicely done way of handling that.

If you want to get to the Google now the Google assistant home page you just press and hold like you would miss with like with the old home screen right there so that’s simple enough to do as well.

So what if you just don’t like that at all and you want to go back to the old way of doing things? You go to settings right here and it’s contact away where you might not guess it’s under system and then it’s under advanced gestures right there. So you can see it says swipe up on the home button turned on.

If you turn that off it’ll go back to using your old-fashioned navigation buttons at the bottom. There they are see how they’ve appeared down there and some just in case you like things the old way better you can still do it.

Notifications per se haven’t changed too much. The little quick-access stuff has been revised a bit. There’s a little bit more space around things probably make it easier when you’re walking around and not really feeling very precise about things and that’s what it is.

The auto-brightness here is trying to use a little bit more AI so. You can set relatively speaking with Auto brightnesses on where you want the brightness to be and it’s gonna try to remember that relative to a given lighting situation so it can match that again and even based on time of day.

Also now in the app sure you’ve got quick actions sort of like apples forced touch only you don’t need a special display center to do it and it’s handled pretty well. So if say they’ve got a prime video here if I press and hold on I’ve got quick access to downloads watch lists library search a lot of apps are supporting this pretty nicely weather bug not too much going on there app info and widgets.

So that’s another nice thing. Maps from work versus home navigation you get the idea there. So that’s another nice little time-saving kind of feature.

The volume buttons have gotten more useful so if you press in that quick access to the mute button if you want to do that no more having to hit and hit and hit on the thing to make that happen and if you tap on the Settings over here you can control each of these different volumes granularly which is nice.

And now we have call volume added in along with your ring volume your alarms and your media sounds.

So what didn’t make it in digital well-being that was a big feature that Google touted but they’ve removed it and it’s gonna appear in a fall update instead so digital well-being is on that helps you with your smartphone addiction and it lets you set timers and alerts you view than spending all too much time on Twitter Facebook whatever it is YouTube you get the idea.

So there it is running very stable and very smooth on the essential phone. And again, this phone is very pretty phone is a real shall we say sleeper now that the prices have come down I gotta say I enjoy the phone a lot. And it’s nice that’s one of the first to get it.

So the update should be coming first two other phones are running Androids project treble and they had the Developer Preview available on the phones.

For bigger manufacturers, as always it’s going to take longer than phones from Samsung and that sort of thing but there you go this is what’s available now and this is what you’re going to see on the pixel three no doubt coming soon. That’s the Android 9.0 Pie.