Bill Roper's Journal

The Lollipop Android update got pushed to my Nexus 5 on Thursday. And it appears to be a case of so far, so good.

The Lollipop load doesn't seem to have anything *wrong* with it that I've found so far and it's got several things *right* on my Nexus 5.

It *feels* a bit faster, although some of that may be actually psychological with the new animations. Battery life doesn't appear to be worse than the KitKat load. Of course, I started out with voice recognition turned off from KitKat -- I don't know if that improves in Lollipop or not.

The old e-mail program has been dumped in favor of the new GMail interface which is at least as functional as the old stock e-mail interface. And unlike the old interface, it hasn't yet managed to tell me that I have a negative number of unread mails yet. :)

And Hangouts seems to have been fixed as a text messaging interface. The version in the initial KitKat / Nexus 5 release didn't work at all, to the point where I downloaded 8ms to replace it. I jettisoned 8ms yesterday, as they started throwing in ads. Ick.

Having the option of showing notifications on the lock screen is handy, as you can glance and put the phone back in your pocket without unlocking it.

In the amusing, but handy in a pinch category, they've added a flashlight function to the load that activates the camera flash as a constant beam. It's not a *lot* of light, but if you drop your keys in the dark, it gives you the handy opportunity to drop your phone to join them -- excuse me, to find your keys.

Wi-fi connections that aren't available no longer show up in the Wi-fi setup, which is nice.

Anyway, from a features POV, it's evolutionary, not revolutionary.

But the speed seems good, so I'm sure there's some serious rewriting down in the kernel.

And that's the early report.

Or in this case, perhaps one dingy ringy.

Spurred on by whl's observation that the bogus number retrieved for my home phone by the stock telephone voice dialer on my Nexus 5 was, in fact, a garbled phone number that a search engine was returning for Homewood Suites in San Diego and the long thread discussing the flawed dialer on the XDA developers forum, I figured that maybe it was time to report the bug. So I sent in the bug report via e-mail and was engaged by first level support.

Fine. I swapped e-mails with first level support until they finally figured out that I was complaining about the phone's voice dialer, not the "Ok, Google" functionality. And then they gave me the script for things to do on a wonky device.

I figured I'd go ahead and execute the script, which I did to no avail. Except that there was simply no way that I was going to run the "Factory Data Reset", because I didn't feel like spending hours putting the phone back together after executing the equivalent of "Let's reinstall Windows now," which is what tech support everywhere seems to tell you to do when they're run out of good ideas. Further, he seemed convinced that if reinstalling the OS didn't work, then I obviously had a defective phone which would need to be replaced.

I was equally convinced that this pretty much had to be a software problem that was not going to be improved by my wasting several hours, let alone getting a replacement phone and then wasting several hours reconfiguring the replacement.

But there had been a number to call in the message, so I did. And I got another first-level tech who asked me if what I wanted were the instructions for the "Factory Data Reset".

Well, no. What I wanted was a supervisor.

And eventually, I got one. And I explained the problem to him in detail and he is now going to forward it to the development team with my good wishes.

I already found a workaround in the XDA-developers thread above -- if you tell the "Bluetooth headset" to go to the "Ok, Google" search engine and dialer, it will allow my car's Bluetooth to bypass the broken stock telephone voice dialer and use the one that works.

So I am ok for now and we'll see what happens next.