Last week, while browsing the XDA forums, I was treated to a wonderful surprise. The Oreo update for the Asus Zenfone 3 was finally here. A quick download, a quick adb command and I had Oreo on my phone and everything was wonderful. Or so I thought.

Within 5 minutes of booting up the device I was hit with a wall of bugs worse than anything I had seen in the beta. Screen going black while the backlight stayed on, apps crashing, 15% battery drain in 20 minutes. What gives? Another trip to the recovery, did a quick data wipe, then another reboot and 5 minutes of setting up. Now, I don’t know if this happened because I had an unlocked bootloader or if this was the process for everyone, but at least it was easily fixed.

Finally getting into the OS itself, I could see Asus had been busy. The first thing you will notice is the lockscreen. Not much has actually changed, but Asus has cleaned it up and moved the clock/weather widget to the left corner. The quick shortcuts (which are now disabled by default, oddly) have been rearranged to a vertical line rather than the horizontal line on the older lockscreen.

New LockScreen and Shortscuts

The next, big, noticeable change was the homescreen. Swipe up to show All Apps, hold for shortcuts, and Google Now integration (this may have been updated on older devices as well, as Asus updates these through the Playstore.) The features that distinguish it from other launchers are still present and function as expected, such as auto-grouping apps into folders in your All Apps drawer and app locking.

Now, if you pull down from the top you will see that Asus has finally adopted the new notification center look. Five easily accessible toggles, then swipe down to see the rest of them. Finally, some consistency with the rest of android. The one ugly feature of the new notification drawer is the constant “clear all” notification that sits bellow everything. Asus decided to make the old “clear all” button — which was unobtrusive, at the top — into a full length notification in the same white color as the rest of the UI.

The new Clear All button in the notification drawer.

Moving on to the settings page we see more of the new blinding white UI. The settings app itself is significantly cleaner than before. The many, many catagories of days past are gone, replaced with only fourteen categories with almost everything being moved around. For example, if you’re looking to turn the “Instant Camera” feature off, it is now hidden in Advanced, listed under Quick Actions. We’re all going to need some time to get used to where all these things are now, but I think the more clean, organized look is worth the trade-off.

New Settings App.

From this we can see that Google and Asus have both moved android to a more consistent and organized OS, visually speaking. In Part two — unfortunately there will be no second part as my Zenfone no longer functions and it’s sort of hard to test performance without the device.