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Personally, I'm usually not a secure lock screen user. Very rare is the occasion that my phone is out of my sight, so I usually just breeze right past the lock screen. But after a tip from a reader, I'm giving the lock screen a second look on Android 5.1. For users who rely on a pattern-based lock, Android 5.1 has yet another delightful detail - a new animation after a successful unlock. Now, the pattern dots float up more elegantly, gently rolling into the transition that delivers the home screen. The dots have animated in gracefully since 5.0, so it's nice to see their out animation catch up.
When Google introduced Android 5.0 with material design back at IO14, one part of the new design methodology that received a lot of attention was animation. Implementing cohesive, sensible, predictable animations is a big part of Google's new design push, but - as the guidelines point out - "delightful details" are just as important.
If you thought we had run out of details to talk about in Android's latest Lollipop iteration, think again. We'll go into 5.1 in gory detail for Getting to Know Android but in the meantime there are still a couple of little details worth pointing out individually. One of those is a tweak to fast scroll bars.
When Android 5.0 introduced the new convoluted detailed notification and volume settings, it did one thing that annoyed a lot of users: it removed the option and the possibility of having a true silent mode, where the phone wouldn't ring or vibrate, but the notifications would still trigger the LED notification light, and the alarms would ring normally. You had your choice of "None," which didn't blink the LED nor sound the alarm, or "Priority," which still let some things through but required a tedious setup.
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When Lollipop 5.0 first launched, it brought with it an interesting set of dynamic Quick Settings toggles. Drop down your notification shade and you could see the usual culprits like WiFi and Bluetooth, but a few toggles were hidden unless they were triggered once, like WiFi Hotspot or Invert Colors. The problem, however, was that once these showed up, they were there to stay ... at least for one month if you never touched them again. Then we found out that you could force them to disappear by setting your date forward a month, then back.
This is decidedly not the heart-fluttering OMaGad-I-must-have-it-now-or-else feature of Android 5.1, but it's worth noting nonetheless. Remember on Android 5.0 when you headed for the About > Status screen of your phone or tablet and were greeted by a long list of information fields that you had to scroll through and try to figure out the logic behind? No? Maybe? Oh... you have already erased all previous recollections of Android 5.0. I see. Here, let me refresh your memory.
Android 5.0 introduced recurring downtime as part of the new notification control scheme, and Android 5.1 brings an important enhancement to this system. You can now choose whether you want programmed downtime to trigger priority mode or block all notifications. It's all right there in the downtime settings, which you still have to dig for.
That new default Android icon in 5.1 we pointed out earlier appears to be showing up in more places than expected. It's the basis for an updated Android Beam icon, which you can see below.
Android 5.1 seemed like a very minor update when it was announced, but there are actually a lot of cool little changes throughout the OS. For example, you can now (finally!) change the system volume while you have audio playing. Google added a new button to make this happen.
You've probably seen that default icon an uncountable number of times. That little 3D Bugdroid with the cube on its chest—it's what Android assigns when something doesn't have its own icon. It's gone in Android 5.1, replaced with a new icon much more in keeping with the style of Lollipop.
Google has taken the lid off of Android 5.1, a minor update packed mostly with bug fixes, but that does little to remove the excitement that comes from seeing the 0 at the end of 5.0 turn into a 1. But some tweaks are included that edge over towards the new feature side of things. One such change is the ability to adjust alarm volume levels from inside the stock clock app.
You're sitting in a bar, spending $30 on beer and nachos because you're too cheap to spend $100 on a month's worth of cable for Monday Night Football. Despite the fact that the place is tiny and the walls are so thin that you can hear drivers in the street swearing at each other, it's somehow also a black hole for cellular service. So you ask the bartender for the Wi-Fi password, then ask him for the right password, then finally get connected... only to discover that the owner hasn't reset the router since the Bucs won the Super Bowl, and you'd be better off on an EDGE connection.
We've already posted plenty of interesting tidbits and changes from Android 5.1, but of course there's still more to uncover. It looks like in the latest version of Lollipop, Google has given the Contacts app a few welcomed tweaks.
File this one in the long list of small but nonetheless significant Android 5.1 improvements. In Lollipop, when you try changing the phone's volume, you get 3 different modes: None, Priority, and All. For better or worse, it's still the case in Android 5.1 with one minor addition: alarms are now integrated as a deadline option.
Android 5.1 is still only available on a limited number of Android One phones, but a few interesting tweaks are already on display. One feature that seems tailor-made for Android One has to do with the dual-SIM capabilities. Android 5.1 includes the ability to set a different dialer theme color for each SIM so you'll know which one you're using to place calls.
We're back — and by we, I mean our best bro in the world, Ramit Suri — with another Android 5.1 interface change. This one is all about the screen pinning feature that was introduced with Android 5.0, which receives a small but useful facelift and an interesting change to its settings.
In case you haven't noticed, we love tiny details that make our everyday lives as Android users better. (And really, in case you didn't notice that, I'll show you the door — it's that X button next to the tab title up there in your browser.) Our friendly Android 5.1 tipster Ramit Suri loves them too, so much in fact that he noticed a teeny tiny detail on the lockscreen.
This might be the best new Android 5.1 feature yet. Lollipop brought with it so-called heads up notifications, where the entire notification appears at the top of your screen momentarily when it first arrives. The problem was that you had only three options:
Despite its appearance on Android One devices, we've had complete radio silence from Google about Android 5.1. Still, as long as it is in the wild, we're going to keep hearing about it. In this case, we have found out that the animation associated with toggling the auto-rotate feature has come back in 5.1 after disappearing in 5.0. Take a look.
Android 5.1 is in the wild on Android One devices, but it's still not totally official yet. Google has yet to announce it and there's no changelog available. As more people get their hands on 5.1, though, we're bound to learn some things about it. Like, for example, the quick settings changes and these neat little animations in the 5.1 clock app.