This post was published 9 years, 9 months ago. Due to the rapidly evolving world of technology, some material it contains may no longer be applicable.
Android’s latest release (Android 5.0 Lollipop) has been a hot topic in the news lately, for reasons both good and bad. Today, I’ll be writing about one of the positive aspects of the new firmware.
As a user of an original (2012) Nexus 7, I felt very let down by KitKat. The tablet was unbearably slow and sluggish, with system crashes being almost hourly occurrences. It was so bad that for two months prior to the Lollipop release, my Nexus wasn’t even charged. I had considered selling it and buying the newer model, but I decided to give Lollipop a go first. Boy, am I glad I did. Read on for my full review of Android 5.0 Lollipop on the original Nexus 7.
Performance
Performance is much improved over 4.4, although it still far from perfect. For the most part, it flies through the UI with the buttery smooth new animations and it opens and navigates apps with ease, however if you have quite a few apps open and it will start to lag a little, although it isn’t horrific. Every so often it’ll lockup for couple few seconds, but it isn’t a regular thing and it’s pretty easy to live with. A marked improvement over KitKat.
Overall the performance is pretty decent as so long as you don’t expect it to rival newer tablets such as the Nexus 7 2013 or the Nexus 9 then you should be pretty happy with this update. However, I am aware that not everyone’s experience regarding performance was so positive with this upgrade. Typically it seems that to truly benefit from the speed increase you are going to need to bite the bullet and perform a data wipe (factory reset) and start afresh.
Design
One of the things Google has been pushing the most with Lollipop is the way everything looks. Material design is beautiful throughout and the animations are slick and fast. From the way the setting cog rolls out from the right when you pull down quick settings, to the clear all animation in the calculator, everything is beautiful. They’ve also implemented tinted status bars in all of the Google apps and third-party developers are also starting to follow suit. All of these are shown off in full glory on the Nexus 7, nothing is dropped despite its older hardware. Visually you’ll get the same experience as even the newest devices.
Battery Life
This is probably one of the best parts of the upgrade. Standby time is absolutely phenomenal and screen time isn’t bad either. On average I’m getting between six and eight hours of screen-on time (it varies based on what I’m using it for) and several days of standby time (again depending on use). Battery saver is also present, although I haven’t tested it just yet as I charge my devices regularly. However, from what I’ve read of other people’s experiences, that’s pretty epic too.
Conclusion
Overall, this update has been the saving grace for the original Nexus 7. While it still isn’t perfect, it’s far closer than it was before. It still stutters every so often, for the most part it’s buttery smooth.
At the end of the day the performance bottleneck for the Nexus 7 is the speed of its internal memory and that is what causes it to seem slow compared to many other tablets. Lollipop doesn’t cure this issue as this is a fault in the hardware itself. However, it does do a pretty darn good job of alleviating its symptoms!
So, that has been my experience of Lollipop on the Nexus 7 2012. If your Android device received its Lollipop update, please let us know how you’re getting on with in the comments below!
