Android 5.0 Lollipop, thoroughly reviewed

Google Calendar—less is less

The calendar has been redesigned, and on phones at least, it is much worse than the old versions. The number of regressions seen here is almost shocking. You can no longer pinch zoom to "zoom out" of a view and see more information. There's no month view on phones, which there is definitely room for on the 6-inch Nexus 6 (which, as the newest Nexus device, Lollipop is supposedly developed on); the most you can do is see a mini calendar. Week view has regressed from a seven-day view in portrait mode to a five day view—but it still shows the same number of characters per line. Everything is bigger, but more space is taken up by the less important parts of the calendar like the date and time.

The agenda view shows a little picture at the beginning of each month, and a fancy parallax scrolling effect shows different parts of the picture as you scroll. But this screen scrolls poorly, with lots of stutters and frame drops. You don't have to take our word for it, either; the second picture in the gallery (above) has the GPU profiler turned on. Every vertical line above the green horizontal line is a dropped frame.

On the plus side, the tablet version isn't bad, although it often feels like Google considers the pretty background picture to be more important than your event data. Reminders—made through Google Now or Inbox—show up on the calendar, which is a nice feature to have.

Messenger—the return of a stock SMS app

Users rejoiced when Google finally integrated all of its chat programs into Google Hangouts, but Google's most important customer, cell phone carriers, apparently weren't happy about all their SMS messages running through Google's app. The response in Lollipop was to create "Messenger," a new stand-alone SMS client. We got to ask about this a few weeks ago when we visited Google headquarters. Brian Rakowski, VP of Product Management for Android, told us at the time:

With the Messaging app [which was removed in KitKat], we always had a nice carrier-centric messaging app—it was meant for SMS. There's a bunch of things carriers demand for SMS that have to work with carrier requirements for that app. There's still Hangouts, but Hangouts is a different type of app for a different situations. It's still there, and it still allows you to switch between IP and SMS.

Basically, carriers wanted a stand-alone SMS app, so Google built one. Hangouts is still here and can still handle your SMSes, but Google is now shipping two SMS solutions. The good news is that you can pick which one receives your SMSes via the settings menu.

The Messenger app looks like it was freshly built. It's pretty simple, consisting of just the conversation list and a conversation view. The action bar and the other person's messages seem to take on a random color, which makes the app quite colorful.

There are attachment options, which bring up a horizontally-swipeable panel at the bottom of the screen. First is the camera, which brings up a live mini-viewfinder right in the app. You can also pick from your camera roll or attach a voice message.

A platform for the future, with lots of changes for users today

While most OS updates fall under the "good" category, the changes in Android 5.0 are significant because they change the way you use your device. Thanks to the fast, hands-free, always-on voice search, I've run more voice queries in the past week than I have all year. It's not something you'll want to do in public, but for a phone sitting on your desk, it's an easy, casual way to get information.

The revamped Recent Apps screen—now called "Overview"—feels perfect. Showing multiple entries from a single app allows users to easily juggle multiple webpages and documents. It's something that makes going back to KitKat incredibly frustrating. Mixing website tabs in with apps removes the last barrier facing "native"-feeling Web apps. From a user perspective, this just makes sense—what's important is what you were doing, not what app you were in.

The Ambient Display in Lollipop (which we covered in the Nexus 6 review) is another behavior changer. When the phone beeps, you can just look at it to see why—no touching necessary. The same goes for the easier-to-access Quick Settings, with long-in-demand features like a flashlight button and auto rotate. It's something that seems very small, but it means one less hacky app you need to install.

For all of its improvements, though, Lollipop is not really a finished product; it's a foundation for the future. It's easy to expect that everything should be done on launch day, but that's not really how Google—or Android—works. Lollipop is the start of an Android revamp, not the finish line, and work remains on the app side of the platform.

Go back to that chart at the beginning of the review. Google can now update so much of "Android" without having to push out an OS update, so major version releases like Lollipop mostly focus on the core OS. Google and third-party developers now have lots of new tools to work with, and in the coming months everyone will take advantage of them.

You can see this work-in-progress approach all over the OS. Not all apps follow the Material Design principles yet—most notably YouTube, Hangouts, and Drive. There's a new camera API with tons of controls, but out of the box you get the old point-and-shoot Google Camera app. Overview replaces Recent Apps and can now show multiple entries per app, but not every app has been updated to support it. Many apps can do smarter things with the Job Scheduler API, but they haven't been updated yet.

Here at Ars, we've still got a lot of work to do, too. Many Lollipop features need to be activated by things that don't really exist yet. Managed profiles will allow you to split the OS between work and home profiles, with separate apps and separate data, but the app needed to activate this feature isn't available. We can't play with the real Kiosk mode, because that takes an app as well. We're waiting on final Nexus 5, 7, and 4 images from Google to get an idea of the before-and-after effects of Project Volta, the camera API, and ART. We'll be digging into all of this over the coming weeks and months.

As it stands now, Lollipop is a great foundation for the future. Its visible changes are nice, but they are only the beginning of an Android ecosystem upgrade.

The Good

• Material Design brings a fresh, beautiful look to the entire OS.
• The animations aren't perfect, but they make Android feel like a slick OS and less like, well, Android.
• Hands-free, always-on voice commands are the best thing to happen to smartphones in years.
• The "document centric" multitasking interface makes multitasking in a single app a breeze. Mixing in websites with native apps makes users think less about the app and more about the task.
• Smart Lock is a nice mix of security and convenience.
• Notifications are improved all around—less interruptions when you don't want them, much more user control, and finally, a do not disturb mode.
• The Quick Settings panel is easier to access and has some long awaited new toggles like auto rotate and flashlight.

The Bad

• Still no phone support for landscape in the home screen and lock screen.
• Inconsistent apps. Some are updated for Material Design, some aren't. Some of the apps that were updated weren't updated consistently.
• The new Google Calendar app is slower and shows less information than the old one. They even removed the month view.
• Gmail taking over e-mail duty gets really confusing if you've switched to Inbox. I'm now using Inbox to access Gmail and Gmail to access Exchange.

The Ugly

• Beware the inevitable TouchWiz release that paves over all the improvements and ships on millions more devices.