The translucent rectangle is gone, giving you an uninterrupted view of your sweet background. Notification dots and PiP are new to Android 8.0 Oreo, but already available on the Pixel 2. In short, Google's new smartphone only made mostly iterative changes on its UI. But re-extending the former "pill" search tab into a full bar as well as bringing it down to the bottom returns it to the spotlight -- like Google wants to re-centralize it in the user experience. Otherwise, killing the bottom grey box and minimizing the top widget bar's text aligns with Google's trend toward cutting the cruft away for a simpler, cleaner UI.

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