Yesterday at Sony’s CES 2015 presentation they slipped something in that we initially missed, but it is (as James May would say) good news! While there haven’t been any mobile announcements at CES as yet, and there probably won’t be, there was a little tidbit snuck in.
You may recall that Sony had earlier promised to bring Lollipop to the Xperia Z3 (and other flagship handsets) fairly quickly. In fact, Sony had promised to update virtually the entirety of its Xperia Z line to the latest version of Android, something which is basically unparalleled in other smartphones.
Well, Michael Fasulo (Sony’s CEO) said the first releases of Android 5.0 Lollipop can be expected for the Xperia Z3 as early as next month. We don’t know when in the month, so it could be week one, or it could sneak into March, but the fact that Sony have twice promised the Xperia Z3 will receive Lollipop and soon, and twice have looked at February as the likely date, gives me some measure of confidence.
For those of you (like me) who are anxiously awaiting this update, it won’t be long now.
Will the update also be for the Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact?
Mixed blessings.
While it’s good to see Lollipop on the Sony products, I’m wondering what this will do to the effort to find a root solution that does not involve unlocking the bootloader. Also, this update will likely break the exploit found to patch out the DRM checks in the camera and screen drivers.
I was hoping Sony would have released some details on the alleged Z4 ultra tablet. Rumours sound too good to be true!
I’m content to wait until Sony has the software running as sweetly as it does currently.
Sweetly? They cant even make the keyboard werk properly. It has incredible lag using the standard Chrome browser. Its insane. Replyou to this thread using the z3. Put on vibrate press so you will feel the lag, put on word suggest or auto correct and start typing a message here. Then remove some words using backspace. If you press it for example 5 times fast then it will only register 3 keypresses. Also the vibrate wil feel lago. Also bluetooth crashes allot. And camera app crashes sometimes. Its the worst software i have ever seen on an android device. It… Read more »
Well, I use Google Keyboard so I wouldn’t know about any of the problems you describe. My camera app has never crashed and I’ve had no problems with Bluetooth either. I’m using a Z3 Compact.
Just installed google keyboard. I must say it works perfect. Had to download the APK though.. It wasnt in the playstore. But no more lag in deed. Thanks! Thats a big relief.
Good stuff! I pretty much just swap the native keyboard for the Google one each time I get a new phone/tablet 🙂
Chances are (given the timeframe and deployment cycles), it will be 5.02 lollipop.. the one that has massive memory leakage that requires reboots plaguing the entire Nexus range now. Thats what happens when you on the cutting edge of software.
The memory leak bug was closed about a week ago. I’d be surprised if Sony can’t get that sorted in the next month and a half.
Given the testing required for these patches (especially on SONY software) and UAT processes and getting it into the deployment stages, it will be pretty difficult. But as you’d say, the alternative is to delay it further – “As early as next month” just isnt too feasible with the latest patches.
I guess we’ll see… Only a month or so to go 🙂
Sony don’t have to adopt the whole 5.0.3 build or whatever launches with the bugfix. They just have to incorporate the fix into the kernel for whatever ROM they upgrade to.
Patching is relatively easy thing – only takes a day or so to do. Since the patch is needed on the kernel level (it is a Kernel bug), regression testing will basically need to be done for the entire device plus all the added SONY software that sits on top to ensure that it does not introduce new bugs into this. Because the part is critical (Kernel), it will need to be done for pretty much everything and requiring the whole test cycle again as opposed to signing off on a component level testing of a smaller part. SONY can… Read more »
You seem to know more about it than me. I’m just going of the little technical knowledge I have and the speed with which Samsung updated my last phone a Galaxy SII for security bug fixes. Either its not as time consuming or Samsung took some risks in pushing the security fixes without a thorough testing.
I wouldnt call myself a Testing/QA expert but worked on enough App Dev to understand the complexities that can come along. Normal people dont understand the overwhelming effort required to do a “simple patch” when you have to retest just about everything. Not to mention that if it DOES break other apps, they will need to fix those as well. I could be wrong and we could see it next month, but willing to bet a lot of cut corners and assumptions will be made to do so.
Of course, this could all be hypothetical as the Sony devices may not be effected by the memory leak bug. From what I’ve seen the N7 2012, N4, N9 and N6 seem largely unaffected. It mainly seems to be a problem for N5 and N7 2013 owners and even then it seems to only effect a minority of users.