In a pleasant surprise, owners of the Asus Zenfone 2 are seemingly getting the Android 5.1 update a bit earlier than was originally anticipated. The Zenfone 5 recently got Android 5.0, and now it looks like Asus are targeting the Zenfone 2 with their next major update. There was a recent post in the Asus Zentalk forum, which claimed that the Zenfone 2 variant with the model number ZE550ML is going to get Android 5.1 before other smartphones.
And according to a brief chat between a customer and a support representative for the company, the update is indeed coming to this device and it’s currently in the final stages of its development. We don’t know what exactly this means in terms of a release date, but we wouldn’t be surprised if users started reporting that their devices are getting updated very soon.
Until something is officially announced, owners of the phone should just keep checking their update menu to see if a new OTA update is available, and even though the news specifically talked about the ZE550ML variant, owners of other models would lose nothing by regularly trying to get the update themselves too.
The Zenfone 2 is a flagship by the company, and it currently ships with Android 5.0, putting it ahead in the game compared to some other smartphones which still ship with older versions of the operating system and require additional updates, or even a rooting in order to get them up to date. It was recently announced that Asus would be delaying the release of Android 5.0 for the Zenfone 4, 5 and 6, and this caused some users to worry that their own handsets will suffer from similar delays as well.
However, this doesn’t seem to be the case as Asus have been preparing more updates for their devices – it’s rumored that the Android 5.1 launch for the Zenfone 2 is not the only thing that’s coming in the pipeline, but we don’t have much information about what other updates we can expect.
Android 5.1 is a release meant to stabilize the operating system and it fixes various bugs, patching several issues that have been quite prominent since the release of Android 5.0, and making the OS an overall better experience. Of course, Google will probably need to improve Android even more over the next few months if they want to completely resolve all issues that users have with the operating system right now, but they’re certainly on the right track.
Some of the fixes included a serious bug which caused alarms to not go off occasionally, and users were also prevented from sometimes deleting messages from the SIM card when it was full. Some bugs with the calculator app were fixed as well, and users who’ve been seeing their Chrome browser crash on startup should no longer experience this issue now.
There were also several problems with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity in Android 5.0, most of which have been patched in the new version of the operating system, but users are advised to keep an eye out for potential further issues and report them as appropriate. It’s not rare that a critical bug is missed in an update like this, and like we said above, it’s probably safe to assume that Google will release at least a few more updates with important bug fixes over the next few weeks/months. With time, the operating system will be able to move on with new features being added instead of the developers having to concentrate on fixing bugs.