Dial M for Android

Android M will usher in a new era of smartphones. Darren Yates investigates Google’s next-generation Android OS and the major advances we’ll see

Android has come a long way in a relatively short space of time since its launch in the HTC Dream in 2008. With Google’s popular I/O conference having come and gone for another year, the search giant has pulled back the curtain on its next Android release, for now called ‘Android M’. Not only will it pick up where Lollipop left off in terms of power management, it’ll coincide with some impressive new features such as faster charging speeds, thanks in part to the arrival of new USB hardware. Here’s a taste of what we can expect to see later this year.

Boot Linux faster

Neil Bothwick goes back to the start of Linux, even before root existed

When you boot your computer, the bootloader only needs two pieces of information: the path to the kernel and the location of your root filesystem, which is then passed to the kernel. In Grub, this would look something like:

linux /boot/vmlinux-3.19.0 root=/dev/sda1