As some of you might know, i have a Galaxy Nexus as a primary device, so no luxury of trying out Android 5.0 Lollipop. For this post i had to lend my brother's Nexus 4 for few hours. This Android 5.0 Lollipop development port was put together by Xda Senior Member sykopompos. Huge thanks to him for this. This port is little bit different than the second Android L Preview that Nexus 5 got. It contains more google apps and is more polished with Material Design.
When your phone boots up after flashing the rom, you get this fresh materialistic Welcome Screen which asks you to select your preferred language. Then it asks you to select Wi-Fi network.
When your phone boots up after flashing the rom, you get this fresh materialistic Welcome Screen which asks you to select your preferred language. Then it asks you to select Wi-Fi network.
Look at that image in the second screenshot below..there's a cool little sunshine that resembles wifi icon.
If you are coming from another device then you can tap your previous device and the phone will recognise your google account and lets you sync the settings and apps from your previous device. Remeber one thing, your previous phone should have NFC for doing this. Otherwise you can skip that process and type your google a/c information.
Google Wallet baby.... yeahhhh. To all those Apple fanboys, Tap and Pay was available in Android since Galaxy Nexus.
This is how lockscreen notifications look in Android L. You also get a shortcut to Phone Dialer App and Camera.You can double tap on the notification to open it. Swiping a notification to the left will dismiss it. Lockscreen also shows your cell carrier info, here being NCELL. You can also see the battery percentage and other informations. Another little addition is the time left to fully charge the device shown in the bottom of second screenshot below.
Here's the Home Screen. As you can see, the Google widget is now flat.. Material Design ehh!
And yes you get the new separate Messaging App. All the icons also have a new design. The navigation buttons are now smaller than in the first preview build of Android L. I prefer these than the previous ones.
Below we have the new messaging app called Messenger and the redesigned Dialer App.
The First screenshot shows the new App drawer. I really like that animation when you open the app drawer.. which is a bit like the google now animation. Some of the app shown below were restored from the previous setup of this device.
New interfaces in the Google Camera app..
The recents screen shows the new app switcher which is more fluid and you get a persistent Google Search widget on top always.
Second screenshot shows the new Calculater app. Note the dark accent in the status bar, a feature in the new Android version.
I was hugely disappointed by the Google Play Music App. You don't get the Materialistic, cool redesigned App as teased in the Google I/O but an unfinished app. Let's hope, come the final release of Android L, we will get a new Play Music app with some material love.
The Equalizer has also changed a bit. It now has a surround sound feature.
Google Drive welcome screens.
The Clock App is also redesigned. The app's background colour changes according to the time of the day.
The new Google Calendar app is the one i loved the most. The UI has been completely refreshed to make the app beautiful. You can now add photos, maps to your calendar. Your Flight reservations, restaurant bookings are automatically added to Google Calendar. Convienient isn't it.
The redesigned Notication Toggles. Flashlight Toggles and Rotation toggles are finally available in the stock Android. Also you can tap the User icon to get the user information or add new user to use the phone or a new guest user mode where you can restrict many apps and functions before letting anyone use your phone.
The new Setting menu looks like this
The Google Keyboard settings menu. You can select between various themes too.
Google Voice search on any screen. One interesting thing to note here is that the you can launch the Google Voice search even when the screen is locked. This should be awesome, the feature which made the Moto X popular.
Some more screenshot because why not..
The cool new Easter Egg in the Android L. A nice little flappy bird like game with Andy.
One thing couldnot test out was the Google Now because of Location reporting not being available here in Nepal. I will use the method I have previously posted in this blog on How to enable Google Now tomorrow and see if it works on Android L.
Battery Saver mode is another new addition in the Android 5.0 Lollipop. One interesting thing i noticed is that the status bar and navigation bar background color turned red when power saver mode was turned on. You can also set to automatically Turn on Battery saver when your battery % goes to 15% or less.
The ROM is very smooth, very buttery which is exactly what you expect from every new Android versions. There are a lots of cool animations thoughout the OS. The battery life is also a lot better, project volta effect maybe. You can certainly use this ROM as your dailer driver.
That's it. Enough material goodness for today. I absolutely loved playing with Android L. I am very excited about the future of Android, Material Design is freakin awesome. I hope the rom developers will bake a Android 5.0 ROM for my Galaxy Nexus soon.
To try out the rom, download the following zip file. It takes about 8-10 mins to boot up so have patience. You can download a torrent file and download from Torrent or you can directly download from AndroidFileHost mirrors.
Stay High on Android! Peace..
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