This post, gentle reader, is brought to you by Android 5.1 on a 2013 Moto X. Three months after the update and a year after the Lollipop launch, and two months after the Japan excursion on which I planned to use it. But hey, let’s overlook how long it took to show up and celebrate that we got an update at all. This phone shipped with Jellybean and now has Lollipop, and you don’t get two full updates for a non-Nexus phone very often.
The swipe function of the keyboard is pretty good given that the keys are just letters on a gray field, and the word correction looks to be pretty good. This is the speech recognition at work, and it seems to be pretty decent. Naturally there is a party piece with this version and it is Project Volta. Just as Jellybean was about getting smooth and responsive UI, and KitKat was about reducing the footprint of the OS, Lollipop is about battery life that doesn’t make you want to give your phone the Rhett Wiseman treatment with an aluminum bat. It won’t be easy to tell for a couple of days because of the way you can’t stop piddling around with a new phone, but my hope is to finally fulfill the Moto X’s original promise of a 24 hour phone that goes 24 real hours.
So off we go. More to follow.