Android 12 Beta 3: Google gives Pixel phones a revamped setup experience [Gallery]

Ben Schoon | Jul 14 2021 - 4:16 pm PT

Android 12 brings a lot of visual changes with it, and now the out-of-box-experience is being updated to match. With Android 12 Beta 3, Google is giving a fresh coat of paint to the setup experience on Pixel phones.

A new setup experience present in Android 12 Beta 3 gives a mostly visual refresh to the setup experience that we’ll see on Pixel phones going forward. The experience will surely be tweaked for other Android OEMs as it always is, but this latest revision sets a nice baseline for others to follow.

What’s new? Besides the visual overhaul, there are a couple of nice tweaks. Google has put further emphasis on teaching navigation gestures with a lengthy tutorial on how to use the gestures. This part isn’t fully new, but seems a bit more in-depth now than it was in previous releases.

Further, Google has added a neat little Easter egg to the first page. The shapes you can see in the first image below move around the screen and as they hit the sides of the display, there’s a very subtle vibration. That’s just the latest in a long list of examples of Google touting the haptic experience it offered on Pixel 4, so it might be a hint that Pixel 6 could bring that feeling back.