Four months after the first release of Android 5.0 Lollipop , Google has followed up with a second version: Android 5.1. The speedy turnaround time compared to Android 5.0 (which appeared a year after 4.4) means that there aren’t many large-scale changes to look at—but the release does feature numerous little improvements and tweaks. It’s faster! (on the Nexus 6, at least) Ron Amadeo 5.1 brings much faster random read and write speeds to the Nexus 6, and the Nexus 5 improves a little, too. 3 more images in gallery 5.1 seems to have eliminated many of the performance issues with the Nexus 6. When we initially reviewed the device, the Nexus 6 was slower at loading apps and switching tasks than the older Nexus 5 had been. With 5.1, the newer phone feels much snappier; with non-game apps, it can now keep pace with the Nexus 5. On benchmarks, we’re seeing much higher random read and write scores on the Nexus 6 with 5.1; random read gets a 2x speed boost, while random write is a whopping 9x faster. The same dramatic speed boosts aren’t present on the Nexus 5, and we suspect the difference is that the Nexus 6 is encrypted while the Nexus 5 is not. According to Francisco Franco , a longtime third-party Android kernel developer, Google is now using NEON instructions on the Nexus 6 to speed up encryption performance. Performance could be further improved by enabling hardware-accelerated encryption, which the Nexus 6 still doesn’t use, but Google has been experimenting with the feature in the Android Open Source Project. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
