Google launches Android 8.1 Oreo final preview

New Delhi: Search engine giant Google has released the final preview build of Android 8.1, a small update to Android Oreo, which is due next month for official launch to consumers.

However, this will be a big update for the owners of Pixel 2 as it supports the phone`s `Visual Core`, an imaging chip Google included but wasn`t ready to activate at the launch of the phone.

This preview update includes near-final Android 8.1 system images for Pixel and Nexus devices, with official APIs (API level 27), the latest optimizations and bug fixes, and the November 2017 security patch updates. You can use the images for compatibility testing or to develop using new Android 8.1 features like the Neural Networks API and others, an Android Developers Blog wrote.

The Neural Networks API provides accelerated computation and inference for on-device machine learning frameworks like TensorFlow Lite -- Google's cross-platform ML library for mobile -- as well as Caffe2 and others. TensorFlow Lite is now available to developers, so visit the TensorFlow Lite open source repo for downloads and docs. TensorFlow Lite works with the Neural Networks API to run models like MobileNets, Inception v3, and Smart Reply efficiently on your mobile device, it added.

Also, for Pixel 2 users, the Android 8.1 update on these devices enables Pixel Visual Core -- Google's first custom-designed co-processor for image processing and ML -- through a new developer option. Once enabled, apps using Android Camera API can capture HDR+ shots through Pixel Visual Core, the blog said.