Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Unicode.org/Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo



A small update to Android 6.0—Android 6.0.1—is official and will start rolling out to devices today. 6.0.1's main purpose for existing seems to be a bunch of new Unicode 8 emoji—which we have dutifully covered in the above gallery—along with small tweaks to the tablet layout and the Do Not Disturb mode.

Unicode.org has a full list of all the current emoji complete with what the emoji look like on other platforms, so we used that to create the above list. The site wasn't entirely accurate, but we fixed whatever mistakes we could spot (we think they had an old Android emoji list).

The redesigned poop emoji (#79 in the list), will probably generate some comments. There also still aren't any fancy emoji "modifiers" for things like skin color yet—everything gets a yellow skin tone and that's it.

Our gallery covers emoji support, which is different from emoji typing. Android 6.0.1 also comes with a new Google Keyboard, which unlocks a few emoji that were in the system before but could not be summoned via the keyboard. We're mostly talking about the country flags—which there are a whole lot of—and a few other oddballs like dial pad number keys.The emoji section of the Google Keyboard has also been rearranged with a new tab layout. There are now 10 tabs for emoji instead of seven, with "flags," "sports," and "food" now getting their own tabs.

And yes, believe it or not, adding new emoji does require an entire operating system update on Android, which is pretty lame. While Google Keyboard can be updated via the Play Store (and needs to be, for the new emoji tabs) the actual fonts are still tied to the system. Break out the emoji font to the Play Store, Google!





As for non-emoji updates: Android 6.0.1 brings a small change for tablets which rearranges the navigation bar a bit. The buttons are no longer centered—"back" and "home" are on the left side, while the "overview" button is on the right. It's.... different. We guess the goal is to make it easier to hit the buttons with your thumbs. This seems an awful lot like the old Android tablet interface that Google switched away from.

Update: It seems this new tablet layout isn't present on the Nexus 9 and Nexus 7. Perhaps it's only for new tablets?

Android 6.0.1 brings back the "until next alarm" option for the "Do not disturb" notification mode. This allows you to switch over to the silent or priority notification mode; rather than picking a set number of hours, you can just have it turn off on your next alarm. This was introduced in Android 5.1, but didn't make the jump to Android 6.0—now it's back.

Android 6.0.1 also counts as the monthly security update for December.

Update: Nexus system images are now available for download.

Another update: The Nexus December security bulletin is now out, too.