The Android 5.1 Lollipop officially released on March 9 has addressed the issues that have hounded and plagued the problematic Android 5.0 Lollipop rolled out in November 12 last year.
While the Google Nexus 6 was among the first few devices that previously raised the issues on the Android 5.0 Lollipop, even citing hanging of the device’s operating system at times because of it, it is now the first among Nexus devices to state for the record that the firmware update has significantly improved.
Apart from the Nexus 6, the Android 5.1 Lollipop has recently rolled out on the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 smartphones, the Nexus 7 tablet and the Nexus 9 phablet.
Although only a few Nexus 6 users have so far experienced the Android 5.1 Lollipop as many have yet to still accept on their devices the over-the-air (OTA) update, a number of power users and developers have actually scrutinized the firmware update like surgeons operating with surgical precision, notes Phone Arena.
A deeper look
Typical with a new firmware update, these people have already dug deep into Android 5.1 Lollipop in order to know and appreciate or criticize the changes and the features that Google has included in the mobile operating system.
Francisco Franco, the developer behind the popular custom Android ‘franco kernel,’ says that the changes that Google has made and released through the Android 5.1 Lollipop are pretty basic.
Primarily, the firmware update, consistent with Google’s promise to the Android community, has brought about performance and efficiency improvements to the Nexus 6. Francisco says that the Lollipop 5.1 has actually made the Nexus 6 running even smoother than before.
While users are still on the lookout for bugs and issues on the device while running on the new firmware update, thus far the Android 5.1 Lollipop is running well and good.
Running on all four cores
The Android 5.1 Lollipop appears to be working well with the Nexus 6 quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 processor.
The device is said to be running on all four cores all the time which helps significantly on the Kernel task scheduler to distribute the workload on all the four cores and makes the operating system of the device hang-free.
There is a tremendous performance gain with the Android 5.1 Lollipop and that has become very obvious with the Nexus 6. In terms of efficiency, there have been reports that Google achieved this on the device by disabling built-in thread migration routines to extend the battery life of the Nexus 6.
This unique feature takes place the moment one task has to be migrated to a different core, distinct from its current core. Under this situation, the task scheduler would automatically inform the destination core to match or exceed the current frequency of the source core, thus lowering the lag. These core migrations happen as often as every 20 minutes so when this feature is disabled, it automatically results in battery life savings.
If there’s a serious drawback to Google’s degrading recent telephone, it’s the camera. This is a Nexus, and that degraded post Android, and that abject Google’s flag Camera app. It’s dread.