Android’s KitKat photographed; we break down all the changes

Side-by-side comparisons of the old and the new.

Ron Amadeo – Oct 11, 2013 12:13 pm | 112

It looks like we’ve finally gotten a glimpse of what the next version of Android, codenamed KitKat, will look like. Italian Android site TuttoAndroid has scored some pictures of the new OS running on a new Nexus phone, which it’s calling the “Nexus 5.” (It’s unclear if the site is using that as an informal name or if it has inside information.) These are the first images that really show the new design changes in store for KitKat. It looks like there will be a lot less black, less blue, and more transparency.

This first shot (above) is our clearest look yet at the front of what we’ll call the new Nexus, showing off the trademark round earpiece. Other than that, the front of the device is mostly a screen (surprise!) with fairly slim-looking bezels. This image gives us a peek at the lock screen, with the main new addition being a camera icon in the lower right corner. Again, we see a device sporting white notification bar icons, which have showed up in previous leaks.

Above is a comparison of a leaked photo and the current Jelly Bean app drawer. The notification and system bars have taken a cue from Motorola’s skin and are now transparent. Like the Moto skin, they will probably revert to black when running an application. The app drawer background is also transparent, ditching the stark black look of Jelly Bean and instead showing the wallpaper. The “Apps” and “Widgets” tabs at the top of the app drawer are gone, along with the Play Store shortcut. TuttoAndroid notes that while the tabs are gone, the widget pages are still accessible by swiping past the app pages in the drawer.

The grid has switched to a 4×5 layout, like the Google Play Edition phones, and the icons themselves are now much bigger. There’s also iPhone-style page notation, which shows a row of dots for each app page, just above the home button.

There are a few icon differences, too. The “Google” and “Google Settings” icons have been switched from square to round. It also looks like the stock Gallery is dead; alphabetically it would be between “Email” and “Gmail,” but it isn’t present in this shot. It seems to have been replaced by “Google Photos,” an app which we suspect is an updated and renamed version of “G+ Photos,” since they share the same icon. By the same logic, Movie Studio, a long-abandoned movie editing app, looks like it has also been cut, since it would be between “Maps” and “News & Weather.” The SMS app, normally called “Messaging,” is missing in action, too. TutttoAndroid says that Hangouts in this build supports SMS, so it looks like that will be replacing the stock SMS app.The two blurred-out app spaces are a complete mystery. They can’t alphabetically start with “Google” since “Google+” would be sorted last. Normally there is nothing between G+ and Hangouts on a new, stock device—they could just be testing apps.

There are a lot of differences here, too. The home screen dumps the line separating the dock from the scrollable pages and replaces it with more dot pagination, just like the app drawer. The app drawer icon loses the outlines and shadows in favor of a frosted-glass circle, and the phone icon is now much more abstract.

Keep in mind that this is all running through Google Translate, but it looks like TuttoAndroid is reporting that additional home screen pages can be added by dragging an icon or widget to the edge of the current home page. The site also says that Google Search can now be accessed as a home screen page in addition to the usual upward swipe. The last page on the left will also be Google Search, similar to how the search function was accessed in iOS 6 and earlier on iDevices, by swiping to the left from the home screen. The report says that KitKat will always be listening for voice commands, similar to the Moto X, but it’s unclear if this means it listens even when the phone is off or just when the phone is on and the home screen is loaded. It’s worth noting that the Snapdragon 800 ships with hardware for a voice control enabled standby mode, just like the Moto X, but no device currently takes advantage of this.

The report wisely notes that since this is a beta build, everything here is subject to change. At the very least, though, this leak can be taken as confirmation that the look and feel of the core OS is finally getting an update.