XDA-Developers have obtained an early build of Android Pie 9.0 for the Samsung Galaxy S9+, which includes the new custom skin and some of the new applications for the new operating system. The biggest change: a new AMOLED-friendly dark theme that looks gorgeous.
But there's also some new gestures on the way.
The dark theme is not only for cool looks — with an AMOLED screen, it could save your phone quite a big of power. In AMOLEDs, each pixel is its own light source so, when there’s a 100 percent black point, that organic LED dot will be just totally off and not use your phone's juice.
Since a screen can use as much as 50 percent of the power consumed by your phone, having a dark interface with 100 percent black backgrounds and minimal use of color for the user experience can translate to extended battery life.
The new Samsung Experience 10 — the skin that will be used in the Galaxy S9’s incoming upgrade to the Android 9.0 Pie operating system — uses a dark theme through its entire interface. According to XDA-developers, it’s called Night Theme. There will be a light theme too, but it appeared to be broken in this apparently quite buggy version of the OS.
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The other big aesthetic change, aside from new icons, is the new card-style UI that has extremely curved corners in the same fashion as Google’s own Material Design language. Some of the images show the new rounded corner card-style. However, at this point, the spacing doesn’t look great.
There are apparently user interface updates through the entire operating system and applications. Not only turning the previous interfaces dark, but updating element layouts. The lock screen, the quick settings panel, the call dialer, the new messages with RCS, Bixby, Mail, Gallery, My Files, and Camera have all been updated. The Camera app, in fact, gets a entirely new user interface.
The XDA-developers blog also reports on a new gesture control scheme. Apparently, Samsung is not following Google’s own new gestures in Android 9.0 but is including its own — something that doesn’t make much sense, as it will only confuse consumers coming from other Pie phones to Samsung’s and viceversa.
Hopefully for Samsung users, the Korean company will release this update soon. Back on August 30, Samsung claimed that it was going to take Android updates “more seriously”. Judging by the early release of this build, it seems that the update may be coming faster than the Oreo update, which took ages to arrive to its flagships and it is still delayed for most Samsung mid-range phone users.
