Saturday, December 6, 2014

First Impressions: Android 5.0.1 on Nexus 7 2013

Yesterday Lollipop finally was pushed to my Nexus 7 2013 device.  The download itself was pretty quick, but the update took sometime.  I put the tablet down and went and made some dinner and when I came back it was still updating.   I think it took about 35 minutes for everything to complete.

Right from the start you already see the Material Design aspect of Lollipop on the tablet.  It looks brighter, and the ease of getting around for the mast part is easier.  It did take me a minute to find the settings from the drop down menu, did not realize to pull down twice.

So far I have poked around in all the settings just to get a feel for it.  The first area I wanted to look at was the profiles.  I would like to see how effective they are for setting up a kids profile

The setup itself was pretty easy.  First things first you need to setup a screen lock for your primary user.  After that you create the new profile and select the apps that you would like the other user to be able to access.

I set it up for my kids to be able to just play games on it, and not have access to play store, twitter, facebook, ect.  The one thing that would be nice, and I may have missed it but give settings for stuff like Youtube.  Some Parental controls in there would be nice, maybe there are some already in the app itself, but does it work with profile switching?  Other programs not owned by Google, I wonder if they have the ability to use the profiles to set themselves up accordingly.  Say Netflix, if its your default account its wide open, but under the other account you might be able to set it up for the kids interface.

Another nice thing about the new version of Android is the speed, its seems to have increased, this could be because of the use of ART vice DAVLIK or it could be the code, or more likely a combination of the both.  Now to have the rest of the apps to start updating to benefit from Lollipop.

Now I am waiting for my Nexus 7 2012 to be updated via OTA to Lollipop.  Hope that happens soon, or I may have to do it myself.   I also hope that it will "speed" up the older Nexus 7 as it seems to be showing its age.


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