Thursday, November 20, 2014

3 days using Android Lollipop on Nexus 5

Have heard all the good things about Andriod Lollipop, and eagerly waiting for the released. When the factory image was out, I was going to install the image on my Nexus 5 myself, but latter found that the platform tools of the SDK has only 32-bit binaries, although I had downloaded a 64-bit version of the SDK. It seems this is a known problem and ignored by Google, saying install a 32-bit compatible layer should do the trick. I don't want to install megabytes of 32-bit layer on top of my pure 64-bit installation system!

Well, I waited not long after, the OTA came and I quickly installed the upgrade (Nov 18). The new GUI does not really impress me, but so long as it does it job, I am fine with it. But compare with the older one from KitKat, I like the KitKat one more.

The new clock application use current time to change its background color, that annoying me greatly, and it has no option to turn that off! It may look nice on the presentation, but it give no value to me. I like to look at the clock on a black background! The layout of the international clock changes to a list from the 2 column layout in KitKat. I think the 2 column layout give me a better presentation.

Browser tabs, I could not find the handle of tabs in the browser, I did not recall I had allowed the browser to merged tabs with apps. Well, at least this time I have a setting to turn "Merge tabs and apps" to off.

The battery saver mode is fine. But why should it insist to change the status and home buttons bar to orange background? With the battery saver icon on the status bar, it is already obvious, why on earth change those background color? I know what I am doing, and does not need such thing to remind me I am in battery saver mode. And no option to turn the color change off.

For media video playing, the volume control button no longer work as expected, instead, I have to click on the button, then tap on the speaker symbol to get sound changes, and dragging on the sound meter bar no longer work. This is really bad engineering.

Skype could not login any more after upgrade to Lollipop, even upgrade to the latest version. One commenter said it needs to be removed and re-install, I follow suite, it could log in again and skype test call works ok, I haven't try the video call yet, will see.

Lollipop defaults to use white background, it hurt my eyes. The color theme of KitKat looks more comfortable to the eyes.

Except those complains, so far so good, the battery usage maybe improve a little, but hard to tell for I am a light user, will see for a longer period of usage.

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