Android 5.0 (Lollipop) review

Android 5.0 is the biggest update to the operating system since the move to Android 4.0 back in 2011, which unified the divergent smartphone and tablet versions of the mobile operating system. This new version of Android is designed not only with those devices in mind, but also smart watches, smart TVs and even smarter cars.

That’s getting a bit ahead of ourselves though, as to date we’ve only been able to test a finished version of Android 5.0 running on the HTC-manufactured Nexus 9 tablet. And even then, we use the word ‘finished’ lightly, as it’s hard to fully appreciate a tablet operating system when you can’t enjoy all the usual content on it yet, as some key apps don’t work properly, or at all..

Google’s own work on the latest version is admirable though, with numerous improvements across the board. As this review is based on the tablet version we won’t cover them all here in detail, but we’ll update as soon as we get our hands on the Nexus 6, or our Nexus 5 gets its own finalised update.

As we haven’t yet got a device that has consumer versions of both Android 4.4 and Android 5.0 we won’t be testing head-to-head for speed in this review, instead we’ll be looking at features, user interface improvements and discussing the general technical basis for the latest version of Android.

GETTING STARTED

The first new feature doesn’t take long to surface. Android 5.0 first asks if you want to restore the state of another Android device on this one. This means it can install all your apps, add your various shortcuts and widgets, and place them all on the homescreen just where you like them.

It then provides you with a (most probably mammoth) checklist of apps, so you can cut down on the clutter you undoubtedly have on your current device. We quickly cut down the 101 apps installed on our Nexus 5 to a much neater, and more tablet-appropriate, list of 13 to be installed on the Nexus 9.

It didn’t go very smoothly though, as many of our chosen apps didn’t want to install on the new operating system, or maybe they didn’t like its brand-new 64-bit processor. Either way, the apps that didn’t install then held up those in the queue to download from Google Play, resulting in complete gridlock. We could see how it was supposed to work though, with greyed out icon placed on the homescreen in positions relative to those on our phone, with the icons filling with colour as they installed.

It looks to be a great new feature for the future, but it’s early days, and it’s not really ideal for phone-to-tablet transfers anyway, given the different usage scenarios for the devices.

Other than that, setup is as easy as ever, just pop in your Gmail address and password and you’re ready to go. Android even remembers Wi-Fi passwords from device to device, so any network details on your previous phone or tablet will be passed over to the new device.

If you’re concerned about security, and you should be, then Android 5.0 will let you lock and unlock your device using another device. Support for Bluetooth and NFC devices means your Android device will unlock instantly in the presence of, or at a tap from, your chosen item. You can of course use a PIN or screen lock pattern should you lose, or forget to bring, your chosen unlock device.

MATERIAL DESIGN

Trends in graphic design don’t come along everyday, so it’s not surprising to see that Google has followed Apple in making an operating system that is simply put: flatter. Icons are simplified with more blocks of plain colour, rather than looking like little 3D rendered objects. Colour is also in vogue, with more colourful icons, more varied colours and more unusual combinations.

The operating system itself is still doing 3D rendering of course, but each object, which Google refers to as a piece of ‘Material’, is flat, like a series of pieces of paper. They can move up and down off the homescreen, cast shadows and be dragged over other objects, but they don’t have any depth themselves. If this kind of thing, and other elements of the design, interests you then check out Google’s own site on Material Design, which has some great little video examples of why it made these choices, and best practice. 

Google has been updating the icons on its big services into its new style for some time, so Chrome, YouTube, Google+ and others are unchanged from their current incarnations, but they now match the new icons for things such as Calculator, Calendar, Clock and Downloads, see below.

All that extra colour has a new white background to shine against too. White was once a pretty bad idea for a mobile operating system, as all that brightness eats battery life, but such things aren’t as critical as they once were, and white looks a lot more approachable than black. The main example is that the app tray now has all your apps sitting in a white window, rather than just hovering over a soft-focus version of your current wallpaper.

Now all this white didn’t just appear from nowhere, it has been in the pipeline for quite some time in the form of Google Now. More and more of Google’s operating system is coming to act and look like the little cards of useful information that make up the service. Notifications are now on a white background, and the recent apps buttons brings up a rolodex of cards, one for every app.

Other changes include a new font, which is finer but keeps the same pleasing simplicity. Brightly coloured floating buttons make it really easy to see how you create a new contact, appointment or email. Plus the three buttons at the bottom of the screen have been simplified into a triangle, a circle and a square, replacing the curved arrow, house icon and multiple window icon that previously represented Back, Home and Recent Apps.

Simpler, brighter, flatter and more colourful, the new Android looks very smart indeed.

HOMESCREEN

The Android homescreen really hasn't changed all that much in terms of practicality, but then it was always flexible compared to its main rival. You can still put app shortcuts just where you want them, drag them into folders and mix-and-match these with widgets from a huge number of apps, many of which are resizable to suit your needs.

Our Nexus 9 had a 6x5 grid on each homescreen to position all this on, with 6 extra spots below in a dock for regularly used apps. New homescreens are created to the right when required and Google Now sits to the left. Google Now has a two-column layout but is otherwise much as ever, with the usual topical and seasonal header graphics.

MENU BAR AND NOTIFICATIONS

The menu bar displays the usual split of notification icons on the left and handy indicators, such as network status and battery life on the right. Swipe down though and you get an all-new combined settings and notifications menu, which consists of white cards over a darkened homescreen.

Each card can be tapped to open it in the appropriate app, dragged down to see more details if they exist. Some also have instant actions you can take, such as replying to emails, or snoozing an event reminder. This works much as before, except for its appearance and some slick animation.

Pull down a second time from the top and you get a handy settings shortcut panel. There’s a brightness, though strangely the auto brightness toggle is stuck in the main settings menu, and once turned on the slider here only seems to work intermittently. We played with it at length and couldn’t work out any logic to it. We’d much rather have an auto brightness control by the slider, which can then be used to tweak the level selected by the sensor.

The settings shortcut panel also shows Wi-Fi strength plus the name of the current connection which you can tap to switch connections quickly; plus there's Bluetooth too. There's buttons for Aeroplane mode, auto-rotate, a built-in flashlight (so no more flashlight apps), a turn on/off location sharing button, and a cast screen button to connect to a Chromecast easily. You can see a battery percentage charge, plus it will estimate charging time to full as well.

We rather liked the old tablet system of swiping down on one side for notifications, and the other for settings, but we can see that a single menu combining both, and one that works identically across phones and tablets is a good idea.

Tapping the volume control brings  up a menu that lets you control who you get notifications from. You can quickly set this to 'All' for no filtering; or limit incoming calls, and email alerts, to only a small set of 'Priority' contacts, basically those starred in your contacts list; or turn off such notifications altogether. You can also set downtime, so you could set up a rule so that only priority notifications come through in the evenings. It's a bit confusing to use at first, and requires careful  mamngement of your contacts list to work well, but it's still a welcome extra.

IMPROVED APPS

We’re not going to go through every app built-in to Android 5.0, but we will break down the changes made to a couple of key ones, Gmail and Calendar.

Email is now entirely subsumed into Gmail, which has a new tablet-friendly interface, consisting of three columns. The first, which is always visible but expands out when in use, lets you select from folders, labels and email accounts. As well as support for multiple gmail accounts, you can add IMAP, POP and Exchange accounts - with the old Email app simply redirecting to this one. It makes sense for Google to concentrate its efforts on a single email app, and it makes it quicker and easier to deal with multiple accounts in one place.

The second column is then a list of your emails in that account or label, with the usual subject and other info. At the bottom of the list is a floating round icon for composing a new email. This looks a little odd at first, but is far easier to find than the previous compose buttons hidden on menu bars.

The third column lets you read the currently selected email, though sending replies opens a full screen window for you to write in. You can also switch to the next email by simply flicking left or right. This column only appears in landscape mode, with the app reverting to a two column mode in portrait mode.

The whole app is remarkably slick and responsive on the Nexus 9, with emails opening instantly, menus scrolling without the slightest hitch, even back through a week of email, which is the amount it caches (no options to cache more disappointingly). It's sliding columns aren't radical, but with a range of improvements, and support for most your email needs, this is arguably the best mobile email app around.

Google has also rebuilt its woeful calendar app into something rather useful. The new app looks a bit like a calendar you'd have hanging on your wall (in month mode anyway) and even has background art depicting the season for that month (we wonder if it switches round in the southern hemisphere?).

In month mode, which is best for casual users who only have a couple of appointments a day, the new calendar actually shows you the names of your appointments rather than simply coloured bars. It's still not quite up to the simplistic zoomy brilliance of Touch Calendar, but the search giant is finally catching up with an app developed by a single man in his spare time.

UNDER THE HOOD

On the surface Android hasn't changed radically then, but under the hood it's a very different beast indeed. The headline has to be support for the new 64-bit mobile chipsets, such as the Nvidia K1 chipset used in the Nexus 9, or the upcoming 64-bit Snapdragon chipsets, most notably 808 and 810.

A switch to 64-bit should bring sizeable performance gains when dealing with complex tasks, where the processor's larger registers can handle bigger numbers. It will also raise the memory limit above the current 4GB ceiling, though that's not really an issue today for mobile devices.

The operating system itself now runs and compiles code differently too, with the new Android Runtime (ART). We should see performance and battery life benefits from the new system, which compiles code to be executed on installation, not when the application launches. It also supports x86, ARM and MIPS processor architectures in both 32-bit and 64-bit. So apps running on some platforms but not others, most notably Intel Atom chips, should soon be a thing of the past.

Google has also looked to improve battery life through numerous improvements under the name Project Volta. This aims to reduce unnecessary battery use when the handset is performing basic tasks such as waking from standby and checking for emails and other updates. The operating system is more efficient in how it deals with such housekeeping tasks and developers have been provided with better tools to manage their battery usage.

Tests on the developer version of Android 5.0 have shown around 35% improvement, and we were impressed by the 16 hours of video playback we got from our review sample of the Nexus 9.

In addition there's a battery saver mode that you can start manually or get to kick in at a certain battery level, say 5%. This throttles performance, the Sunspider score more than doubled to a sluggish 2,156ms, and it restrains radio usage, so apps don't update unless you open them. It looks handy, stretching out your last hour of battery life without the usual dance of disabling Wi-Fi and mobile internet (which renders your phone pretty useless anyway). You know when it's running as the menu bars turn orange to warn you.

TEETHING ISSUES

We did have some teething troubles with Android, as we mentioned the restore function got completely bunged up by apps that were incompatible with the new operating system, or the new hardware, hard to say which.

Even once installed we had issues with important apps such as iPlayer, which wouldn’t download programmes or stream them at anything more than passable quality. We couldn’t load the Amazon Prime Instant Video player either, though that’s a tortuous process done via the main Amazon app anyway.

Now these issues can’t be laid at Google’s door, but be aware that it’s early days and some app providers simply aren’t up to speed yet. If having all your apps working is more important than having the features discussed above then we’d recommend holding off a couple of months. There’s no point in having a new operating system if you can’t watch the film you want to watch.

We also saw a couple of minor graphical bugs, such as the names of apps disappearing as you scrolled onto the homescreen that sat on, but nothing that’s more than irksome and couldn’t be fixed by simply restarting or moving the offending object.

CONCLUSION

Android 5.0 Lollipop looks great, the new design and colours really are a breath of fresh air. All the built-in apps we use regularly have had major facelifts and most have been improved in the way they work too, easier to understand and with better tablet-landscape layouts.

The design itself is so strong, with the appearance and animations fitting together so tightly, it’s hard to see how manufacturers will adapt Lollipop for their own devices without breaking Google’s uniform look. However, with the right level of effort we could see some fantastic conversions and modifications.

Beneath the hood the operating system is certainly much improved too. Battery life looks to be excellent, though we’ll need to do before-and-after testing on a wide range of devices before we can confirm that. Support for 64-bit is a must of course, but it’s still welcome.

It’s early days, and so there are some issues with some apps, but for most Android device owners we’re happy to say that an update to Android 5.0 is something to look forward to, it’s the best version of Android yet and though the changes are evolutionary, it’s still an important move forward.

Of course we’ll have to see what the big manufacturers do with the vanilla version of the operating system. And we’ll be reporting on that and updating this article with discussion of Samsung’s, Sony’s, HTC’s and others versions of Android 5.0. For those with Motorola or Nexus devices though, this is what you’re getting and you should be pleased.