So after long anticipation the Note 3 Neo has been upgraded to Android 5.1.1 (Lollipop) {Yes – in they year of Mashmallow Android 6.0}. Android upgrade process is a big debatable topic so no use getting into it and very few companies do it on time except for Nexus, Android One, Moto and some top end phones from other manufacturers. Samsung support page didn’t mention the arrival date of the update so I was relying on message boards and forums for that (I keep the auto check option for software update switched off). So 3 days back I got the news that 5.1.1 has started seeding for India and once I checked for the update I was notified its a 895 MB update OTA. After a couple of hours downloading and some 5-10 minutes of the actual upgrade process my Note 3 Neo booted up in Lolipop land. Material design, card based multi-tasking windows and faster / smoother operation (supposed to be..)
First of all the icons of the Samsung TouchWiz UI looks slightly different, bigger but more better looking now than the KitKt days. the whole theme of the layout follows default Android lollipop look with flat colors and the touchwiz UI has white backgrounds rather than the dark black theme. Some preloaded bloatware seems to have been taken out but new ones have taken their place. A theme manager is sadly missing when some other samsung phone with Android lollipop preloaded has those.
So having used it for a couple of days now the battery life seems to be holding up as before (which gives me 1.5 – 2 days) and the overall functioning seems to be good without any major flaws. Sometimes when unlocking the screen the phone seems to be slow and stutter to come to life, and after closing all the apps and clearing the RAM it seems to run fine again. If you face bigger problems try wiping your cache partition by booting in the recovery mode.
Note: The OTA update process keeps all the data intact but to be safe it’s better to back-up data using Kies.