<story><title>Android 5.0 Lollipop reviewed</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/11/android-5-0-lollipop-thoroughly-reviewed/?</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>buro9</author><text>Received the calendar app this morning, it is a major step-backwards.&lt;p&gt;What was once a killer app, a core productivity tool, has given way to an almost unusable interface.&lt;p&gt;It is now really hard to perform some tasks.&lt;p&gt;For example, I am a heavy calendar user and I have something in the calendar almost every day. It is now extremely difficult to answer the question: When is a three hour window free in the next month or two?&lt;p&gt;That used to be a single glance at the month view which communicated to me full day events, part-of-day events, and for the latter which part of the day and how long the event took. A single glance at month view could answer it and I could move forward backwards to glance at the next&amp;#x2F;prev month.&lt;p&gt;Old: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dropbox.com/s/kiic7fdrmu65172/2014-11-13%2006.56.24.png?dl=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.dropbox.com&amp;#x2F;s&amp;#x2F;kiic7fdrmu65172&amp;#x2F;2014-11-13%2006.56...&lt;/a&gt; (October 2014 in the old v4.4 Calendar app)&lt;p&gt;To achieve it now, I&amp;#x27;d need to use the 5 day view, and for each 5 day segment to scroll up and down as even on my Moto X (2014) I cannot view more than half of the working day.&lt;p&gt;New: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dropbox.com/s/pgqbhnc1ifp02a9/2014-11-13%2006.56.51.png?dl=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.dropbox.com&amp;#x2F;s&amp;#x2F;pgqbhnc1ifp02a9&amp;#x2F;2014-11-13%2006.56...&lt;/a&gt; (October 2014 in the new v5 Calendar app)&lt;p&gt;Gone is the ability to use Calendar on the phone as the core way to organise your life, it is essentially now unusable on the phone for anything other than a near-term agenda&amp;#x2F;itinerary.&lt;p&gt;All of the new Gmail&amp;#x2F;Inbox to Calendar features? Dead to me, all of my accounts are Google Hosted accounts and none of the Google Now, Gmail, or Inbox integrations with Calendar work on Google Hosted accounts.</text></comment>
<story><title>Android 5.0 Lollipop reviewed</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/11/android-5-0-lollipop-thoroughly-reviewed/?</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bane</author><text>Pure conjecture, but at some point, Android is basically just going to be the Kernel and a distribution medium. Everything else will come from the Play store, the GUI, device drivers, the fonts, the apps, the clock, core APIs, the runtime, &lt;i&gt;everything&lt;/i&gt; and the OS will simply move to rolling partial updates. Version x simply won&amp;#x27;t be meaningful anymore and the kernel can stay static for years and years.&lt;p&gt;This is a great future that honestly wouldn&amp;#x27;t have happened if it weren&amp;#x27;t for the fragmentation and slow update issue that carriers and device manufacturers created. It&amp;#x27;s like trying to grab toothpaste once it&amp;#x27;s out of the tube. The harder you squeeze, it simply finds another crack in your hand to go out of.&lt;p&gt;Material is also fantastic, almost joyful to use. It almost nails the flat-with-a-dash-of-skeu that Microsoft and Apple have both missed.  There&amp;#x27;s still a few too flat bits here and there, but it&amp;#x27;s a great place to be.</text></comment>