What’s New? Google Pixel December 2020 Update and Feature Drop is Out!

Hi, everyone.

Today the Android 11 December security update was released to pixel devices along with a pixel feature drop. Now you may already have the security update if you’re on a Samsung phone, but it’s up to your manufacturer to decide when they want to update it and push it out to your device. But if you’re on a pixel device and the supported pixel devices for this update are pixel 3 and newer. So pixel three, pixel 3 XL pixel 3, a pixel 3a XL, pixel 4 XL, pixel 4a, 4a 5G and pixel five that I’m using here. So I’ve got the pixel five and the pixel four XL. And so this particular update was fairly significant and it has a lot of new things in it. So the first thing is, depending on which device you installed it on, it was 136 megabytes on the pixel five.

Now it was a couple hundred megabytes on the pixel four XL. So it’s going to vary a little bit for you now, as far as the build number. Well, this particular build is you can see it scrolling by there. Well wait for just a moment. And it says its RQ 1a.201205.11 And this particular build, like I said, has a lot new in it. So as far as the pixel feature drop, well go over that first. And then well go over the fixes and security updates a little bit later. Now the first thing is a little while ago, we got a couple of features for the pixel five, such as Google assistant on hold. That’s now available for the pixel three-year later. So maybe you’re on a phone call and you put it on hold.

You want the phone to notify you when to come back. It will do that. Now, if you’re on one of the supported devices and now a new feature that’s available as well is extreme battery saver. So if we go into our settings and then we go to battery and then we go down to battery saver, if we turn it on, we have extreme battery savers. So if we really need to save a lot of power, we can save power. It says when to use essential apps and you can customize this based on what you want to do. So always use ask every time. So as needed, I’ll have it ask every time and then you can have it select essential apps to actually use or not use. So it will shut all of them off in the background, making sure they don’t use any power.

So it’s really nice that they’ve added that feature and it should get you even more battery out of the latest updates. Pixel five has been amazing on battery and it’s just getting better. So that’s great to see now to go along with the extreme battery saver, they’ve also updated adaptive battery. So now it’s more context aware to help you get more life out of your battery. So maybe you haven’t plugged it in. You forgot to do that. It will be more aware of what you’re actually doing to help preserve your battery over time until you can plug it in or wirelessly charge. Now to go along with that, they’ve added adaptive battery and that helps preserve your battery health over time.

So the way this works is basically it will dynamically control how quickly the device charges, but also well make sure its charged by the time you wake up. So plug it in at night. If you set your alarm, for example, you go into your clock app and then you set alarm. And once the alarm is set for say seven 45 in the morning, it will make sure that it’s charged to 100% by that time. So basically it might charge up to 80%, hold it there until it’s time to charge to get you to 7:45 AM at 100%. So it will do that dynamically in the background based on what you need and what you set your alarm for, and its controlled by the alarm. So that way, if you set it, it will charge that way.

Very similar to how iOS does it by basing it on what you do as far as the time you wake up or go to sleep. So then you can just put your phone on the charger at night now to go along with that, there’s also some updates to photos. So if you’re using Google photos, they’ve changed the interface. So if you go in here and you go to the edit interface, you now have a little bit different overall interface for controlling your edit. So you’ve got enhance and warm and cool. And then of course, crop and adjust and filters and everything else, but the interface has just been updated. It looks a little bit more pleasant.

It’s an easier interface to use. And I think the user interface in general is just much better. Now, if you use Google duo, there’s some updates there as well. So if you go into duo and in Google duo, if you’re on a video call with people, you can now share your screen with them as well as a video. So before you could sort of sync a video up and watch it with other people, now you can share your screen as well and show them what you’re looking at to better collaborate with them. So that features now updated in Google duo. Now they’ve updated audio as well. This is a pretty interesting feature. So your pixel can automatically adjust the sound of the equalizer to better adapt to the situation in the room. So similar to the Google home, the Google home max, where it listens to the environment and tries to better the sound.

This will do the same. So if we go to sounds and vibration under the settings, we can go to let’s find it here, adaptive sound. And now we have adaptive sound. It says, improve speaker sound quality by adapting audio to your environment.

If we turn it on, when you’re playing music, it will adapt. So that’s really nice that they’ve added it. Of course we have the option to turn it off if we don’t want to now as far as 5g phones. So if you have a pixel for a 5g or a pixel five that uses 5g, they’ve built it into the background now where it will switch between 5g and 4g automatically to save you power.

And they’ve actually laid it out that saying that it will use 4g for things like web browsing or sending texts, which use less data and then switch to 5g, watching a movie to download larger files. So its intelligent. It will do it in the background and save you power. And that should continually help in the future with 5g modems. They’ve also improved accuracy of the GPS on the pixel five and all the other pixels as well. So if you’re on one side of the street for a ride sharing service, you should be able to be seen by that person on that side of the street. It will just be more accurate as to where you’re located. Of course you can turn off locations and everything as well, but you can more accurately show where you’re at and it helps with all of those settings. So you’ve got Google location accuracy on, make sure that’s on and you’ll be good to go.

Now there’s also a new feature that translates from your screen. Now we’ve had pixel translator, Google translate, but you can now take a screenshot. So maybe you’re on a website and I haven’t gotten this to work, but if you slide up, take a screenshot or maybe you select what select text here. You can now translate that text. There we go. So if I highlight that tax, I can translate it and well use Google translate to translate it. And now it’s telling me what the text says.

So you'll screenshot it otherwise you can pick the textual content, translate it in actual time, just so you can see what it’s doing. Now. It uses Google lens to do that. And there may be additional options for you as well, a little bit later, Just go into your app, switcher there, screenshot and select it. So if you screenshot again, you can go in and do the same sort of thing. 

Now, if you’re using music like YouTube music, and you have your now playing history, you can use that history to now create a playlist. Now I don’t use this app too much, so I don’t have a whole lot in here, but you can create playlist through your now playing history. So go back through your history of playing and then you can create playlists from that within the pixel feature drop, there was something else updated as well. If we go onto the home screen, press and hold, go to styles and wallpapers, of course you can change your wallpaper. We know that, and you have different things in here. So if we go into art, there may be some new ones as well, but what they’ve changed is style and grid. So under style, of course you can customize your icons to the different shapes you may or may not want. And let’s do that again. It’ll reset the style.

Now they’re all squares and we can go back to grid and change the grid size. So we can go two by two all the way up to the default. So I’ll go back to the default style overall, but you now have more options for that on your phone to customize it, how you’d like built into the OS itself. So those are the things that are in the pixel feature drop, but there’s other fixes as well. And so for example, a lot of the fixes pertained to the pixel for XL. So I’ll let you know which devices they pertain to. But the first thing is in the pixel for XL, the first three fixes pertained to this, there’s a fixed for static noise in Spottily. So if you use Spottily specifically, it will fix static and also fix background, audio static in third-party camera app.

So if you’re using an app other than the default camera app, it should fix that issue. And they also support dark mode in the boot loader for the 4 XL as well. So when its booting up in boot loader, it will be in dark mode, at least supported in dog dark mode. Now there’s a fixed for lost Bluetooth pairing information that pertains to the pixel 3, 3 XL, 4, 4 XL, and also the three, a and three Axl. And then they fixed a pairing issue with Garmin devices, with the pixel four and four XL specifically, there’s also a fixed for display flicker in various use cases, again with the pixel for XL and for as well as improved haptic vibration intensity. In certain cases with the same phone, the four series phones.

Now the last fixed specific to the pixel four and four XL is a fixed for misaligned device orientation in certain cases. So if I go to Androids website here and were in landscape, it will now fix any misalignment. The final fix suppresses the power button menu when you’re using tap to pay in certain regions. So if you’re pressing it, it won’t necessarily activate improperly that’s on the pixel two to XL all the way to the four and four XL. So that’s been resolved now, as far as security patches, there’s quite a few of those I’ll go over them quickly.

So framework there’s 22 security patches media framework, there’s 19 system, there’s 40, Kernel there’s 11, there’s Broadcom components, patches. There’s two of those three media tech components, patches, 11 Qualcomm components, and 20 Qualcomm closed source components have been passed. And so with the latest security updates and everything else, this is definitely something I would install if you haven’t already. So if you’re thinking whether or not you should install Android, Elevens December security update, I would say absolutely just the security updates in general, along with all those bug fixes, especially if you have a pixel device, our welcome change or welcome fix if you were having those issues.

But let me know if you’ve updated already in the comments below. And of course Ill link this wallpaper in the description like I normally do. I would not expect this to affect anything as far as speed, or of course, battery life with that battery saver, it should be much better,