Today, Google has announced the addition of two new features to the Android OS, the Bedtime mode and the updated Clock app. In addition to these features, the pixel phones get an updated version of Adaptive Battery. While the Bedtime mode reminds you of your sleeping time, helps you to keep distractions away to make it easier for you to sleep, and keep a track of your sleeping hours to maintain a healthy sleep cycle, the updated Clock app now has a tab for the Bedtime mode to control its settings and visualize your sleep data. The updated Adaptive Battery feature, on the other hand, uses more techniques to reduce battery usage.
Bedtime Mode
Starting with the Bedtime mode, it is a revamped version of the Wind Down mode that has been available in Android OS for quite a long now. First off, the Bedtime mode will remind you of your sleeping time and also wake you up, according to the sleep and wake times that you set in the mode.
Once it’s your sleeping time, the Bedtime mode will silence your calls, texts, and other notifications, and turn the colors on your phone’s screen to black and white, to keep the distractions away and to reduce your draw to the screen, helping you to sleep on time. You can, however, turn on and off, and customize these features of the Bedtime mode according to your preferences. If you need a few more minutes with your phone, you can pause the Bedtime mode; there is no need to reschedule it.
Coming to its sleep tracking feature, the Bedtime mode shows you a graph of when and how much amount of time have you been on phone and in bed during your sleeping hours, for the past eight days. Furthermore, it can play sleep sounds of your choice when it is your sleeping time. That’s not all, it even shows you a tab of upcoming events for the next day from your calendar app for you to tally the amount of sleep you’ll be getting before you wake up.
From where do you customize all these settings of the Bedtime mode though? Well, for that we need to discuss the updated Clock app.
Updated Clock App
The updated Clock app now has a fifth tab in it – Bedtime – apart from the Alarm, Clock, Timer, and Stopwatch tabs. This Bedtime tab is from where you can set up the Bedtime mode and tinker with all its settings. Other than that, there is nothing new in the updated Clock app.
Although, if you don’t want to navigate to the Clock app to enable or disable the Bedtime mode, you can turn on and off this feature with its quick setting toggle from the notification pane. Furthermore, you can also opt to enable the Bedtime mode automatically once you plug in your device to the charger, from the Bedtime settings in the Clock app.
Updated Adaptive Battery
The Adaptive Battery feature made its debut with the Android 9 Pie operating system. It uses AI to analyze which apps would you be using next and which apps would you be using later. It then reduces the battery usage of the apps that you will be using later using various methods, including the part where it reduces the app’s refresh rate.
If that wasn’t cool enough for you, Google has now updated the Adaptive Battery mode with multiple new features. It can now predict when will your phone’s battery run out and when you are likely to charge your phone next. Based upon these predictions, it reduces the power consumption and goes into a lower power mode to keep your phone running for longer.
Which Phones Will Get These Features?
The Bedtime mode and the updated Clock app will be available as standard features of the Android OS. However, the updated Adaptive Battery is exclusive to Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL, Pixel 3, Pixel 3 XL, Pixel 3a, Pixel 3a XL, Pixel 4, and the Pixel 4 XL smartphones.
