Android O could bring a Bluetooth battery indicator for your headphones

By Christian de Looper July 31, 2017

android bluetooth battery phone headphones — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Android may soon get a helpful feature for those that use Bluetooth headphones — the ability to tell you exactly how much battery your Bluetooth devices have left. The feature recently gained support from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), XDA Developers reports. What that means is that Android, by default, will allow users to check their Bluetooth devices battery on their phone.

Now, as noted by some engineers in the original post, some third parties — including Samsung, LG, and OnePlus — have supported the feature in their software for some time now, as has iOS. So in this case, Google is finally adding a feature to stock Android devices that others have been thinking about for a while. It is also not clear exactly when the feature will make its way to a full Android release — though considering the next Pixel is rumored to do away with the headphone jack, it wouldn’t be all that surprising to see it pop up in Android O.

We also do not yet know exactly how the feature will be implemented on Android. As noted in a report from The Verge, the battery status may show up in a notification or somewhere in the settings. Thankfully for phone manufacturers, it looks like the feature is customizable, so they can have it show up wherever they want or wherever it fits into their software.

Android O is the next major release of Android and its set to bring a number of new features. For example, as we noted in our hands-on review of the latest Android O Developer Preview, notifications are set to get revamped with Notification Dots — making the operating system a little more like iOS. On top of that, users will now also be able to snooze alerts and set them to pop up at a later time. To do that, you drag a notification to the right-hand side of the notification shade, and a little clock icon will appear. Tap on that will bring up the ability to reschedule the notification. Another major new feature in Android O is “Copy Less,” which basically uses machine learning to predict when you want to copy and paste text and the feature will do it automatically.

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