Android Lollipop has been around for a while now, and now that the first rush of excitement has subsided, we’re down to answering the most fundamental question. What is it like to actually live with Lollipop?
The answer – not so great actually.
In the thrill of receiving Lollipop on the Nexus 4 device (I wrote about that here), it was easy to get caught up in just how pretty the whole OS was. The notifications are clean, the revamped colours are exciting, the contacts section looks awesome and the new keypad (white instead of black) is much clearer and better.
However despite the appearance and some other obvious benefits – like the ‘battery saver’ feature that can effectively drag out the last dregs of your battery – there have been a few bugs with the OS that are simply too glaring to ignore.
Getting stuck on the start animation
This has happened a number of times. While starting, the phone gets stuck on the Lollipop animation, which is essentially four coloured dots looping around each other. The phone is supposed to pass from this screen into another that says ‘android’ before it finally opens up your home screen. Instead you’re stuck watching those dots looping around and around till you feel vaguely dizzy. And according to this report in the Android Central forum, there are others who are facing this issue as well.
We were able to resolve it by performing a ‘hard reset’ – that is holding down the power button and the ‘down’ volume button together for a few seconds. But other users on Android forums have said that they had to perform a full factory reset before the issue was resolved. This is an extreme step given that you will lose everything on your phone once you do this.
Google clearly needs to release a fix for this… and fast.
Camera performance
The camera on the device is almost unusable now. Firstly, it takes forever to open on the phone, and another eternity before it begins to focus. And on a number of occasions, it has just completely crashed the entire device. The pictures it does take are often fuzzy and unclear. So if you’re hoping to capture a few of those special moments, be prepared to watch your phone shut down instead.
And like the previous problem, this is not one that is unique to just this phone.
According to this report in Gizmodo, ‘lagging and crashing’ is one of the ‘biggest’ problems with the new OS.
Network issues
This has been a widely documented issue with the OS upgrade and our device has not been spared either. More often than not, the network symbol will have a little exclamation mark next to it which means that one has no internet access. Restarting the device does the trick sometimes, but you don’t always realise that you have lost connectivity. Given that this happens more than once a day, one has to now obsessively check, but obviously you should not have to.
Laggy Keyboard
The space bar on the keyboard doesn’t always seem to work and sometimes it just can’t seem to keep up with the pace of our typing. Now we were not in a speed typing contest, so this is not in any way a reflection of skills. But compared to some other users, we got off easy. For example, a colleague has to contend with seeing this:
All this of course begs the question – why was Google in such a hurry to release Lollipop ahead of time when it was still clearly buggy? The number of complaints on common forums for Android and Nexus are testimony to the fact that there are a lot of disgruntled Lollipop users out there, and there is no word from Google on fixes and updates yet.
Some tech help sites suggest a factory reset and even the extreme step of rolling back to Android KitKat until the situation improves. While we wouldn’t go that far as yet, one wouldn’t blame someone who would.
Source : FirstPost