Android 5.0 Lollipop Rolling Out To Sony Xperia Z3, Z3 Compact And Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact
Recently, Sony announced that it would upgrade some of its Z2-series devices, as well as the more recent Z3-series smartphones and tablet, to Android 5.0 Lollipop. The devices that were supposed to receive the Lollipop upgrade were the Xperia Z2, Xperia Z2 Tablet, Xperia Z3, Xperia Z3 Compact and Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact.
Today, Sony will begin the rollout for the Xperia Z3, Z3 Compact and Z3 Tablet Compact. However, the timing and availability may differ depending on the market or the carrier. Sony announced that the lower-end Xperia T2 Ultra and Xperia C3 will also receive the Android 5.0 upgrade.
From the looks of it, Sony's recent upgrade, which is heavily inspired by Google's new "material design" guidelines, looks even more like the stock version of Android than the previous Sony custom UI did. In fact, it's probably the closest stock-like custom UI for post-Lollipop devices, which should be a major benefit to some Android smartphone customers. Although Sony seems to have added its own implementations in some places, the design has remained minimalistic and modern.
One area where the company improved Google's software is in making it easier to move applications from local storage to the SD card. Google isn't a big fan of SD cards, as we've seen with the Nexus devices over the past few years, but most other devices out there still have them. Many low-end devices don't have much room left on the internal storage, which makes the SD card expansion necessary.
Sony also incorporated Lollipop's multi-user features, which allows multiple family members to use the same device. That may not happen too often with a smartphone, but tablets are often used by multiple people. Lollipop's multi-user accounts makes it easy for everyone to have their own accounts and switch seamlessly between them.
Last month, Google announced the "Android for Work" program that can help users create work profiles that isolate and protect work data. IT admins can then install approved applications but not have access to users' personal applications. Sony supports this program across all of its Lollipop devices, including all the ones being upgraded.
The company will share more information about what other devices will receive the Android 5.0 upgrade soon.
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Lucian Armasu is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He covers software news and the issues surrounding privacy and security.
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alex davies Just got the update notice for the Canadian Xperia Z3. Not OTA though. You have to use your PC to download and install it.Reply -
smccloud Now if only the Z3v would get the update in a timely fashion like the rest of the Z3 series.Reply -
Valantar I got the OTA 5.0 update for my Z2 (Norwegian) a little more than a week ago. It's been absolutely great so far. Very few bugs for such a major update (not to mention the few I've seen have been very minor), and both design and functionality has seen major improvements.Reply -
uglyduckling81 This is the biggest problem with Telstra in Australia. They will spend 6 months putting all their useless bloatware in before it gets released.Reply -
Sakkura I've had this on my Xperia Z3 Compact for nearly two weeks now. Haven't noticed any bugs.Reply -
ohim And i`m rolling for few months 5.0.2 on my Galaxy S3 .... why are big companies willing to modify so heavy the rom that they come out with an update so late, CM are already experimenting with 5.1Reply -
uglyduckling81 Yeah custom roms do come out a lot faster. I certainly always ran custom roms on my S3 until it died. I always found the official roms to be more stable though. A few times I rolled back to official when I got annoyed by bugs or crashes with CM or which ever rom I was running at the time. Not much else positive to say for official roms though.Reply -
Sakkura Reply
They spend a lot more time on validation. People running cyanogenmod are much more tolerant of bugs than the average user.15585610 said:And i`m rolling for few months 5.0.2 on my Galaxy S3 .... why are big companies willing to modify so heavy the rom that they come out with an update so late, CM are already experimenting with 5.1