Android 4.2 to feature quick settings accessible by dual notification panes? [VIDEO]
Android 4.2 is said to be on its way with the arrival of the LG Nexus, and with it should bring some mildly exciting changes. It won’t be as big as the “K” (Key Lime Pie, maybe) update that will come at some point down the line, but things are already shaping up quite nicely.
So what’s new today? Well, the latest peek into this tiny, tiny keyhole shows us some very interesting new functionality with the notification pane. The pane has been activated with a double-swipe mechanism that will bring a second pane down, and in this pane was a placeholder with a big graphic saying “Future Site of Quick Settings.”
Quick settings tend to be buttons to individual toggles like WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS et al. which give you the ability to turn them on and off without having to hop all the way into the settings menu. It’s something many of us have enjoyed on custom ROMs or the likes of TouchWiz and HTC Sense for quite some time and it’s exciting that it finally appears to be in by default.
The interesting thing is that most tend to just stick the toggles at the top of the notifications pane, but Google looks like they’ll opt to give these quick settings a space of their own. One of two things (or both) could be the case here:
- Google doesn’t want to take up valuable real estate within the notification pane. With the expanded notifications introduced in Jelly Bean they’ll want to make sure users have ample room to see everything their notifications have to offer.
- Google wants to use some nice big buttons for presentation’s sake. Yay!
Speculation only gets us so far, though, so we’ll need to wait until Google finishes development on the feature to see what, exactly, we’re getting.
Should rumors turn out to be true we should be learning more on the 29th of this month when Google and LG are rumored to unveil the next Nexus phone, but we can’t say for certain that will actually happen on that date so don’t hold us to it if we go beyond that date without any answers. [via Android Police]
