Hangouts

Hangouts also gets a big update with KitKat — finally integrating SMS and MMS with everything else it offers. In fact, it replaces the default Messaging app from the core of Android entirely, although you can still download a third-party SMS app and use that instead.

And you might want to, since the SMS integration in Hangouts isn't all that great. Google makes you "tie" SMS messages to one Google account — if you have two, you'll need to remember which account they live in. What's worse, SMS messages do not appear in the same conversation thread as your Hangouts messages — they're cordoned off in their own thread. Many other smartphone operating systems get this right: iMessages on iOS both auto-detects and threads SMS, and hell, webOS got this right from the start. Google did tell me that it's working on it, writing, "initially, we're focused on the core SMS experience on Hangouts for Android. We're working hard to make the SMS experience on Hangouts even better over time."

Hangouts needs to decide what it wants to be when it grows up

Honestly, it's not clear yet just what Google wants to do with Hangouts. It could be positioned as an iMessage competitor, but Google is still shying away from auto-detecting whether your recipient uses Hangouts. With Hangouts On Air, it also weirdly mixes live video broadcasting into your private messaging client. Last but not least, there's Google Voice to contend with. Currently, you can't send text messages from your Google Voice number within Hangouts, though the company promises that is coming. That's quite a lot for a single app.

On top of all that, Google has Hangouts on multiple platforms — many of which it doesn’t directly control. That makes creating something that works like iMessage especially difficult, and could go some way towards explaining (but not excusing) why Google made the choice to not thread SMS. On the bright side, you can change your notification sound for SMS so they don't sound like incoming Hangouts messages, and there are new little icons indicating whether or not the person you're talking to is on a phone.

All that said, having SMS within Hangouts is at least a step forward, even though it's hard to know what direction Google is walking in and easy to see that there are many more steps ahead. For me, I'm just happy to have one less icon I'm trying to cram into my home screen.

Phone home

With core apps like the Launcher and SMS getting Googlified, it makes perfect sense that the phone app would get the same treatment. Instead of presenting you with a simple number pad, the main screen is now a listing of the people you call most often — or who call you most often. Google says it determines who is up top algorithmically, and in my testing it did a pretty good job of that. Since version 4.3, the number pad itself is smart too — it will use T9 to let you search your contacts instead of just dialing, something I've been waiting for on a Nexus device for a very long time.

The other big feature in the dialer is the ability to search businesses directly. Google uses its extensive Maps database to search for local businesses, so when you call, it shows a photo associated with the business and names it appropriately in your call log — so when a business calls you, you know who's calling.