 Last week Google introduced us to Android 4.4 KitKat and the new Nexus 5. Now what's interesting about both of these things is neither one blows the doors off of anything design-wise. They're both relatively conservative. The design of the phone is pretty simple and the feature updates they included in KitKat are kind of minor when you look at it. But for Google that's actually not a problem. They really think that they nailed the core structure of Android with Ice Cream Sandwich and ever since then it's been about refinement. Since we first introduced this Android style with Ice Cream Sandwich, right, we were really confident that we were on to something. That we had a center to our design language that was built for the future. The system's now maturing so our lowest level is what we call our hardware abstraction layer is maturing. So that means that with each subsequent version of Android we don't have to redesign or re-engineer core parts of it. And so that makes it easier and faster for device manufacturers to bring up their next devices. KitKat is really about three things. The first is its ability to run on low-end hardware. Now that's important but it doesn't really apply to the Nexus 5. What does apply to the Nexus 5 are all the refinements and polish that they've added to the UI. The consistency in the status bar, so all the icons are now the same color. You know, nobody's going to notice that but it makes me very happy. The expanded range of Roboto that we have now is giving us a little bit more typographic freedom. In the home screen we made the icons bigger. You know, nobody's going to notice. Oh, I know. That's great, I love it. This is why I love talking to you guys. Also notice that you guys got rid of the little weird tabs in the app drawer. What was the thinking, you just wanted to simplify it? Yeah, again, we just want to make it, if you're going to add something from the app drawer you just make that app drawer experience all about apps. The translucency, that's new in KitKat and that's an opt-in feature so you can decide if it makes sense for your app to be translucent or not. So something like a launcher at wallpaper makes a lot of sense or the lock screen at album art makes a lot of sense. We have new modes as well. We have what we call a full screen immersive mode. The idea is that the system UI literally folds back out of the way. Now we had that before, the difference now is that the mode can latch into that mode because you know, you find Fruit Ninja, the classic problem, you're swiping and you accidentally fold. Now we can have that UI go away and stay away until you actually do an explicit swipe up to get it. Most importantly, KitKat shows that Google is able to take all the different pieces of its company and start building it into Android. Having the Google Now cards just to swipe away, being able to say, okay Google, don't actually do something. But have it do something, you know, just by hitting the home button, you know, anytime that you're there, as soon as you unlock the device, I think that's great. If you look at dialers on smartphones, the phones have been getting smarter but the dialers have traditionally kind of been stuck in a feature phone world. I had one of those paper takeout menus, remember those? It's actually printed, you know? And so I punched in the number, like dialed in the number and actually figured, my phone figured out that I was calling Pizza Chicago. And that was kind of, I guess I already knew that I was calling Pizza Chicago, so that part, okay fine. But what was cool was, it was in my call log as Pizza Chicago now, not as a random set of numbers. So then when they called me later to say, hey, your delivery guy is on their way, I knew who it was rather than saying, okay, I have no idea what this number is. I'm sure everyone's had that experience. It really starts turning the types of things that you do to be less about you, predicting what you're going to need and downloading the app ahead of time and putting it in the right place and instead switching to the model that we all use on the web where Google is going to help you find what you need when you need it. And actually some of the time help you find it before you know you need it. Instead of Google Apps just being a thing that you run on Android, Android is becoming Google.