Lollipop

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As you may know, I have Android 5.0 Lollipop installed in my Moto G, I did this 13 days ago and so far thing are going well, the system is responsive and even whit all those animations it is fluid, although there are some parts that I don’t really like.

Lets start with the things that I like.

First, everything is fluid, all animations runs smooth even whit this phone that is not the beast as the flagship models. The material design language adds a lots of animations and those in Kit-Kat were a bit choppy, but with Lollipop they run perfectly at least at 30 fps if not 60.

The new notification bar is indeed an evolution of that it was, its more functional now that the quick settings area is just a pull down ahead and include more options than with Kit-Kat, still, custom ROMs like Paranoid Android are beyond this, letting you customize this area (in Kit-Kat).

The “meh..”

The recents panel is not limited to a small number of apps, it seems to remember all the apps you have open since the phone booted up, this have its downside since there may be a lot of apps in the recents, it doesn’t mean they are all open but there are traces of it in the recents panel, it may be just easier to open the app from the homescreen or app drawer instead of looking for it in recents. Also, I don’t like that Chrome splits all its tabs in the recents, at some point you don’t know how many “tabs” you have open.

The “buu!”

Although there may be tons of new API functions/methods in the OS to support Android Wear and other fancy things, to be honest and aside from the material design, Lollipop doesn’t offer something new to the table, it is prettier? yes, as it should be, but I don’t see a key feature that it wasn’t in 4.4.

ART to a simple mortal user means nothing, is like if you changed the sparking plug of your car, it may improve something but the normal user won’t really notice something.

So..

So far so good, Android 5.0 Lollipop feels like a more mature OS, but if you have KK there should be no rush to upgrade since there is possibly nothing new for you.

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Lollipop at the Moto G

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As you may know, I have a Moto G, a great device at a really low price, it has a 720p display that gives you 320dpi, 16GB of storage which to me is more than enough, 1GB of RAM, again, enough; and the latest version of Android. Well, you may have Android 4.4.4 but you can install Android 5.0 by now.

The Brazilian version of the Moto G, the XT1033 (dual SIM) have now the upgrade if you enrolled to the Motorola feedback program, then getting the OTA was just a matter of time.

In order to upgrade to Lollipop you must flash your device with the Brazilian firmware, you need then an unlocked bootloader, but if you are interested (or desperate) enough to install it I guess you already have it unlocked.

What you will need to have:

  • Unlocked bootloader
  • fastboot
  • adb
  • a custom recovery (eg. TWRP)
  • Brazilian firmware from here.
  • OTA Update from here.

What you will need have to do.

  1. Restore the stock Brazilian firmware
    fastboot flash motoboot motoboot.img
    fastboot flash logo logo.bin
    fastboot flash boot boot.img
    fastboot flash recovery recovery.img
    fastboot flash system system.img_sparsechunk.0
    fastboot flash system system.img_sparsechunk.1
    fastboot flash system system.img_sparsechunk.2
    fastboot flash modem NON-HLOS.bin
    fastboot erase modemst1
    fastboot erase modemst2
    fastboot flash fsg fsg.mbn
    fastboot erase cache
  2. Boot the phone and let it build the basic structure of the system.
  3. Reboot into the bootloader.
    1. Press the Power Button and the “Vol Down” button for around 5 seconds, then release them, you should see the bootloader menu.
  4. Flash the custom recovery
    fastboot flash recovery custom_recovery.img
  5. Copy the OTA update to the SDCard.
    adb push Blur_Version.210.12.40.falcon_umtsds.Brasil.en.BR.zip /sdcard/ 
  6. Flash the stock recovery (from the  stock firmware)
    fastbook flash recovery recovery.img
  7. Then reboot into the stock recovery.
    1. Turn off the phone,
    2. Press the Power Button and the “Vol Down” button for around 5 seconds, then release them, you should see the bootloader menu.
    3. Press one time Vol Down to select “recovery” then hit “Vol Up” to select it.
      1. You should see the Android robot with the belly opened and an alert triangle with it. Don’t worry, you haven’t bricked your phone (yet).
    4. While in this screen, hit Power Button and “Vol Up” for around 3 seconds, the recovery menu should appear.
  8. Select Install update from ZIP
  9. Select the ZIP you put in /sdcard/
  10. Wait for around 15 minutes, until it says that the upgrade is done. The “Patching system files” process is the one that takes that long.
  11. reboot.

Emmmm.... Android developers... Aquí cómo??Habemus lollipop

 

Did you upgraded to Lollipop? Post your screenshots in the comments 😉

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