Thursday, January 22, 2015

Reports indicate that Google has taken definitive steps towards launching their own cellular phone service, making a long-whispered rumor sound like more than just hearsay. Google is working on deals with bothSprint and T-Mobile to become a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) on their infrastructure. While details are sparse for now, this might be your surest bet to avoid bloatware if there ever was one.

An MVNO is a third-party who uses a major carrier's network to provide service. For Sprint and T-Mobile, this is a key revenue source that helps justify their investments in improving their coverage. For consumers, current players like FreedomPop and Virgin Mobile provide additional choice and price competition. While most MVNOs offer non-contract plans, it is not clear at this time whether that would also be true for Google. This could be a venue for them to subsidize the Nexus line.

The report, first published by The Wall Street Journal, mentions that the program has been codenamed "Nova" internally. That sounded familiar to us, because we had been tipped about a similar program called "Nova" last year. We had not been able to get more info and did not report on it - until now.

Our tipster told us that Google Voice (now, that would probably be Hangouts) would be the backbone of the Google plans, which would be data-only. With access to mobile data and possession of a Voice number, the experience would theoretically be nearly equivalent to a conventional phone plus data plan. The tipster also told us that the plans would offer unlimited data, while leaning on WiFi where available.

Neither today's report nor our tip makes it clear what network(s) the plan would utilize. T-Mobile is a GSM carrier while Sprint uses CDMA. For high-speed data, these networks are interoperable provided devices have the right frequency radios. Legacy interoperability (that is, 3G) is dicier.

This isn't the first time you may have heard about Google as an MVNO, either. In April, we reported on a rumor that Google was planning some sort of venture to offer cell service in Google Fiber markets. Today's report is far less modest than just a small rollout, but don't be surprised if it does in fact start on a limited basis like the original rumor.

At this point, Google doesn't have to do much to keep the big carriers on its side. While years ago appeasement was necessary to make sure Android devices were given a fair shake, they now occupy a huge chunk of market share. The benefit that comes with that is things like this; pissing off AT&T and Verizon isn't much of a risk like it once was. Instead, a Google-led cell phone service could drive prices down and give Google control over distribution and software of their (and other OEMs') devices.

For those of you who have been claiming Google would launch their own carrier since the launch of the Nexus One, congratulations! You're sort of, kind of right. They're never going to build out their own towers and the like, but this is almost like being a carrier.

Google Reportedly On The Verge Of Launching 'Nova,' A Cellular Phone Service To Compete With Big Four Carriers

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With the HoloLens, Microsoft promises it can deliver a true next-gen computing experience while other tech giants struggle to do the same.Microsoft

REDMOND, Wash. -- In the bowels of Building 92, hidden underneath the company's public visitor center in a secret series of labs, Microsoft let a few people try out what may be the most ambitious Windows device ever made: a holographic headset that aims to rival the most advanced virtual reality devices out there.

Microsoft's HoloLens is expected to run Windows 10 and apps -- holographic ones that will float in front of your line of vision and apps that can be run on phones, tablets, PCs and the Xbox One game console. With the holographic programs, Microsoft is trying to transform how we think about computing, productivity and communication. Just as VR rivals Oculus (owned by Facebook) and Google are trying to reimagine virtual experiences with their head-worn devices, Microsoft wants us to imagine a world without screens, where information merely floats in front of you.

"We're not talking about putting you into virtual worlds," HoloLens leader Alex Kipman said Wednesday during an event at Microsoft's headquarters here. "We're dreaming beyond virtual worlds, beyond screens, beyond pixels."

Kipman started working at Microsoft seven years ago, when he pitched the idea for the Kinect motion camera, a video game device that tracked a player's body movements. The Kinect went on to become one of the fastest-selling devices in history.

For the last five years, Kipman has been focused on taking the innovations inside the Kinect -- cheap and powerful motion-sensing cameras, voice control -- and packing them into a pair of transparent goggles.


Microsoft appears far along in realizing this augmented reality vision. With HoloLens today, the company has designed a convincing prototype that floats 3D images in front of you and that can change the look of real-world objects all around. But it's unclear how Microsoft expects to deliver on CEO Satya Nadella's commitment that such a device will be for both consumers and businesses.

Also unsaid: How much it will cost. Microsoft said it expects to release a finished HoloLens within the same time frame as Windows 10, which should arrive sometime this year. The Oculus Rift's various developer kits, on the other hand, have cost upward of $300 in the past, with its consumer model expected to come in between $200 and $400. Samsung's Gear VR headset runs around $350.

Microsoft's glasses are different from Oculus Rift goggles, which promise to transport you to a different world and open up numerous possibilities for film, TV, sports and other entertainment. HoloLens uses a technology called augmented reality, which overlays images onto real life and lets you interact with them. In theory, this is easy, but the biggest struggles competitors have had so far have been to design a headset that can stand alone, untethered from a computer or power source, and travel into various environments. Overcoming those challenges is necessary before mainstream consumers will buy into such a bold vision for next-generation computing.

From Mars to Minecraft

As we're led down the stairs into the basement, we're told that we can't try the more polished, all-in-one prototype Microsoft just showed onstage. Instead, we'll be using an earlier, uglier prototype. The company doesn't allow smartphones or cameras into the room.

The device's holographic processing unit, the special processor Microsoft designed to basically help the HoloLens interpret movement and sound, is cased in a separate, chunky box intended to be worn around your neck. The glasses aren't the sleek, space gray model Microsoft unveiled this morning, but a mass of metal. A long chord tethers me to a pair of PCs that are helping feed the goggles their images.

 14 Photos

Microsoft HoloLens (pictures)

The demo was unique in that it showcased a feasible and realistic use of augmented reality that wasn't bombastic or meant to marvel. I was able to do something I can say I haven't done in quite a long time with help from a total stranger who was seeing through my eyes and drawing on my reality to direct me through a task.

After checking the voltage on the wires, wrapping coils around the respective screws and capping the loose wires, I picked up a remote control and tapped a button. The light came to life. I had only to look up so the person on the other end of my eyes could see the end result of our successful collaboration.

Microsoft's HoloLens is no joke: My reality augmented with Skype, Minecraft

9:51 PM , ,

Microsoft HoloLens


It’s the end of October, when the days have already grown short in Redmond, Washington, and gray sheets of rain are just beginning to let up. In several months, Microsoft will unveil its most ambitious undertaking in years, a head-mounted holographic computer called Project HoloLens. But at this point, even most people at Microsoft have never heard of it. I walk through the large atrium of Microsoft’s Studio C to meet its chief inventor, Alex Kipman.

The headset is still a prototype being developed under the codename Project Baraboo, or sometimes just “B.” Kipman, with shoulder-length hair and severely cropped bangs, is a nervous inventor, shifting from one red Converse All-Star to the other. Nervous, because he’s been working on this pair of holographic goggles for five years. No, even longer. Seven years, if you go back to the idea he first pitched to Microsoft, which became Kinect. When the motion-sensing Xbox accessory was released, just in time for the 2010 holidays, it became the fastest-selling consumer gaming device of all time. Right from the start, he makes it clear that Baraboo will make Kinect seem minor league.

Kipman leads me into a briefing room with a drop-down screen, plush couches, and a corner bar stocked with wine and soda (we abstain). He sits beside me, then stands, paces a bit, then sits down again. His wind-up is long. He gives me an abbreviated history of computing, speaking in complete paragraphs, with bushy, expressive eyebrows and saucer eyes that expand as he talks. The next era of computing, he explains, won’t be about that original digital universe. “It’s about the analog universe,” he says. “And the analog universe has a fundamentally different rule set.”
Translation: you used to compute on a screen, entering commands on a keyboard. Cyberspace was somewhere else. Computers responded to programs that detailed explicit commands. In the very near future, you’ll compute in the physical world, using voice and gesture to summon data and layer it atop physical objects. Computer programs will be able to digest so much data that they’ll be able to handle far more complex and nuanced situations. Cyberspace will be all around you.

What will this look like? Well, holograms.

First Impressions


That’s when I get my first look at Baraboo. Kipman cues a concept video in which a young woman wearing the slate gray headset moves through a series of scenarios, from collaborating with coworkers on a conference call to soaring, Oculus-style, over the Golden Gate Bridge. I watch the video, while Kipman watches me watch the video, while Microsoft’s public relations executives watch Kipman watch me watch the video. And the video is cool, but I’ve seen too much sci-fi for any of it to feel believable yet. I want to get my hands on the actual device. So Kipman pulls a box onto the couch. Gingerly, he lifts out a headset. “First toy of the day to show you,” he says, passing it to me to hold. “This is the actual industrial design.”

Oh Baraboo! It’s bigger and more substantial than Google Glass, but far less boxy than the Oculus Rift. If I were a betting woman, I’d say it probably looks something like the goggles made by Magic Leap, the mysterious Google-backed augmented reality startup that has $592 million in funding. But Magic Leap is not yet ready to unveil its device. Microsoft, on the other hand, plans to get Project HoloLens into the hands of developers by the spring.

Kipman’s prototype is amazing. It amplifies the special powers that Kinect introduced, using a small fraction of the energy. The depth camera has a field of vision that spans 120 by 120 degrees—far more than the original Kinect—so it can sense what your hands are doing even when they are nearly outstretched. Sensors flood the device with terabytes of data every second, all managed with an onboard CPU, GPU and first-of-its-kind HPU (holographic processing unit). Yet, Kipman points out, the computer doesn’t grow hot on your head, because the warm air is vented out through the sides. On the right side, buttons allow you to adjust the volume and to control the contrast of the hologram.



Microsoft’s Lorraine Bardeen demonstrates HoloLens at the Windows 10 event at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington on Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2015.

Tricking Your Brain


Project HoloLens’ key achievement—realistic holograms—works by tricking your brain into seeing light as matter. “Ultimately, you know, you perceive the world because of light,” Kipman explains. “If I could magically turn the debugger on, we’d see photons bouncing throughout this world. Eventually they hit the back of your eyes, and through that, you reason about what the world is. You essentially hallucinate the world, or you see what your mind wants you to see.”

To create Project HoloLens’ images, light particles bounce around millions of times in the so-called light engine of the device. Then the photons enter the goggles’ two lenses, where they ricochet between layers of blue, green and red glass before they reach the back of your eye. “When you get the light to be at the exact angle,” Kipman tells me, “that’s where all the magic comes in.”

Thirty minutes later, after we’ve looked at another prototype and some more concept videos and talked about the importance of developers (you always have to talk about the importance of developers when launching a new product these days), I get to sample that magic. Kipman walks me across a courtyard and through the side door of a building that houses a secret basement lab. Each of the rooms has been outfitted as a scenario to test Project HoloLens.

A Quick Trip to Mars


The first is deceptively simple. I enter a makeshift living room, where wires jut from a hole in the wall where there should be a lightswitch. Tools are strewn on the West Elm sideboard just below it. Kipman hands me a HoloLens prototype and tells me to install the switch. After I put on the headset, an electrician pops up on a screen that floats directly in front of me. With a quick hand gesture I’m able to anchor the screen just to the left of the wires. The electrician is able to see exactly what I’m seeing. He draws a holographic circle around the voltage tester on the sideboard and instructs me to use it to check whether the wires are live. Once we establish that they aren’t, he walks me through the process of installing the switch, coaching me by sketching holographic arrows and diagrams on the wall in front of me. Five minutes later, I flip a switch, and the living room light turns on.

Another scenario lands me on a virtual Mars-scape. Kipman developed it in close collaboration with NASA rocket scientist Jeff Norris, who spent much of the first half of 2014 flying back and forth between Seattle and his Southern California home to help develop the scenario. With a quick upward gesture, I toggle from computer screens that monitor the Curiosity rover’s progress across the planet’s surface to the virtual experience of being on the planet. The ground is a parched, dusty sandstone, and so realistic that as I take a step, my legs begin to quiver. They don’t trust what my eyes are showing them. Behind me, the rover towers seven feet tall, its metal arm reaching out from its body like a tentacle. The sun shines brightly over the rover, creating short black shadows on the ground beneath its legs.



Microsoft

Norris joins me virtually, appearing as a three-dimensional human-shaped golden orb in the Mars-scape. (In reality, he’s in the room next door.) A dotted line extends from his eyes toward what he is looking at. “Check that out,” he says, and I squat down to see a rock shard up close. With an upward right-hand gesture, I bring up a series of controls. I choose the middle of three options, which drops a flag there, theoretically a signal to the rover to collect sediment.

After exploring Mars, I don’t want to remove the headset, which has provided a glimpse of a combination of computing tools that make the unimaginable feel real. NASA felt the same way. Norris will roll out Project HoloLens this summer so that agency scientists can use it to collaborate on a mission.

A Long Way Yet


Kipman’s voice eventually brings me back to Redmond. As I remove the goggles, he reminds me that it’s still early days for the project. This isn’t the kind of thing that will be, say, a holiday best seller. It’s a new interface, controlled by voice and gesture, and the controls have to work flawlessly before it will be commercially viable. I get that. I love voice controls, and I talk to Siri all the time. But half the time, she doesn’t give me a good answer and I have to pull up my keyboard to find what I’m looking for more quickly. Project HoloLens won’t have a keyboard. If the voice and gesture controls don’t work perfectly the first time, consumers will write it off. Quickly.

That said, there are no misfires during three other demos. I play a game in which a character jumps around a real room, collecting coins sprinkled atop a sofa and bouncing off springs placed on the floor. I sculpt a virtual toy (a fluorescent green snowman) that I can then produce with a 3-D printer. And I collaborate with a motorcycle designer Skyping in from Spain to paint a three-dimensional fender atop a physical prototype.

As I make my way through each, Kipman seems less nervous than when we began, but no less focused. It has been three hours since we met. In each scenario, he watches a screen that shows him what I am seeing, and he watches me trying to use his device for the first time. His eyebrows draw down in deep concentration as he checks to see if every calculation is perfect—noting the touch of my thumb and forefinger as I make an upward gesture, the words I reach for instinctively to instruct the computer. Seven years in, he is trying to see Project HoloLens as if for the first time. To see it through the eyes of a 30-something female New Yorker. But that is one thing his magical head-mounted holographic computer cannot do. At least not yet.

Project HoloLens: Our Exclusive Hands-On With Microsoft’s Holographic Goggles

5:09 PM , , ,

Engineered bacteria kept in check with a designer diet

By Nature

Critics of genetic engineering have long worried about the risk of modified organisms escaping into the environment. A biological-containment strategy described this week in Nature has the potential to put some of those fears to rest and to pave the way for greater use of engineered organisms in areas such as agriculture, medicine and environmental clean-up.







Two US teams have produced genetically modified (GM) bacteria that depend on a protein building block — an amino acid — that does not occur in nature. The bacteria thrive in the laboratory, growing robustly as long as the unnatural amino acid is included in their diet. But several experiments involving 100 billion or more cells and lasting up to 20 days did not reveal a single microbe capable of surviving in the absence of the artificial supplement.

“Our strains, to the extent that we can test them, won’t escape,” says Dan Mandell, a synthetic biologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and an author on one of the two studies describing the strategy.

The microbes also do not swap their engineered DNA with natural counterparts because they no longer speak life’s shared biochemical language. “Establishing safety and security from the get-go will really enable broad and open use of engineered organisms,” says Farren Isaacs, a synthetic biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who led the other study.

Biocontainment could provide added safety in the biological production of drugs or fuels, where microbes can be kept separate from their surroundings. But the modified bacteria could also permit controlled release into the human body or the environment. “Containment might no longer be of the physical kind,” says Tom Ellis, a synthetic biologist at Imperial College London who was not involved in the research.

The new technique originated in the laboratory of George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School. Two years ago, Church and his team (which included Isaacs) reported the synthesis of a strain of Escherichia coli that had a reprogrammed genetic code. Instead of recognizing a particular DNA triplet known as the amber stop codon as an order to terminate protein synthesis, the recoded bacterium read the same instruction as a directive to incorporate a new kind of amino acid into its proteins.

Church and Isaacs have independently made this engineered microbe reliant on unnatural amino acids. The Isaacs team used genomic sequencing to identify sites in essential bacterial proteins where the microbes could incorporate synthetic amino acids without affecting overall function, whereas Church’s group started with the protein structures and added elements to help integrate and accommodate the artificial amino acids.

“This is really the culmination of a decade of work,” says Church.

These organisms are also more resistant to viruses than their natural counter­parts because of the mismatch between the genetic code of the virus and that of its host3. Looking ahead, Church and his team are working to co-opt seven different codons, instead of just one. “That would be more than enough to be resistant to all viruses and to create a lot of opportunity for safety,” Church says.

Isaacs has also developed a different safeguarding system, in which E. coli can grow only in environments containing synthetic chemicals needed for gene expression. He described the work this month in Nucleic Acids Research4. Another research team led by Jef Boeke at the New York University Langone Medical Center and Patrick Yizhi Cai at the University of Edinburgh, UK, has been working on a similar strategy in yeast. Commonly used in industry and biotechnology, yeast has its genetic mater­ial packaged in chromosomes similarly to animals and plants rather than bacteria.

“That’s a strategy that is going to be more easily adaptable to other organisms beyond E. coli,” says Isaacs. His team is now engineering a bacterium that is dependent on synthetic chemicals as well as on artificial protein building blocks. “I think ultimate solutions for robust biocontainment will involve multiple approaches that are deployed at the same time in a single organism,” he says.

Such a beast will present a real challenge for regulators, says Todd Kuiken, senior research associate for the Science and Technology Innovation Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC. “What we’re now starting to talk about is a really, completely synthetic organism,” Kuiken says. “How do you evaluate that once you put it out into the field?”

GM microbes created that can’t escape the lab

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5 things that need to be fixed ASAP with Android 5.0


Google's Android 5.0 Lollipop release haslots of good things going for it -- but like many major OS releases at their start, the software also has its share of sigh-inducing quirks and glitches.

As Lollipop slowly makes its way to more devices, let's hope Google fixes these pressing issues sooner than later:

1. Memory management


I'm not the guy to pinpoint the source of the problem, but something's clearly amiss with memory management on Android 5.0. I first experienced it while reviewing the Nexus 9 and have since seen it (and read countless other users' reports of it) happening on other devices as well.

In short, Lollipop -- on some devices, at least -- seems to have trouble keeping processes running in active memory. As a result, you'll sometimes experience things like recently used apps "refreshing" and starting from scratch when you return to them, music-streaming apps like Google Play Music or Pandora randomly closing when they're running in the background, the home screen taking a moment to "redraw" itself when you return to it, and system-level actions like loading the Overview list acting less responsive than they should.

The fact that these things are now happening on multiple devices -- including both those designed for Lollipop and those that didn't have such issues prior to running Lollipop -- seems to indicate that it's a broader OS-level issue as opposed to anything limited to one particular set of hardware. And suffice it to say, that isn't a good thing.

2. Silent mode -- or lack thereof


Lollipop's new notification system is plenty powerful, but it's lacking one fundamental option: a simple way to set your phone to silent.

In past versions of Android, you could either just lower a device's volume all the way down or long-press the power button and use the direct shortcut there to activate silent mode. On Lollipop, lowering the volume all the way on a phone gets you to a vibrate-only state -- but there's no way to move from that to silent. And the power button shortcut is no longer present at all.

Instead, you have to first press your device's volume-up or volume-down key and then select the new "None" notifications setting -- which isn't at all intuitive and is going to confuse the hell out of most ordinary users. And on top of that, the "None" notifications setting prohibits even alarms from sounding, while a traditional silent mode does not.



The search for silent mode on Android 5.0

The only other option you have is to configure Lollipop's "Priority" notifications setting so that it'll allow alarms to sound but nothing else. That's an awful lot of work for something that should be so simple, though -- and again, it's something most ordinary users aren't going to figure out.

(On tablets,  you can still activate a silent mode by lowering the volume all the way until the device goes into vibrate-only and then pressing volume-up once from there.)

This may be less of a bug and more of an odd design decision -- but whatever you want to call it, it needs to be fixed.

3. Overloaded Overview


Lollipop's expanded approach to multitasking is one of those things that's great in theory but not quite there yet in reality. The basic idea is that the Overview button -- the command next to the Home button, also sometimes known as Recent Apps -- brings up a scrolling list of cards with all the processes you've used recently on your device. You can then jump directly to any of those tasks on demand, regardless of where you are in the system.

Part of that means that Overview no longer contains only apps, as it did in previous versions of Android; instead, it now splits apps apart into multiple steps, each is which is represented by a separate card. If you open Gmail and then start to compose a new message, for instance, you'll see a card in the Overview list for both Gmail itself and for the individual message.

The problem is that the Overview list quickly turns into an enormous mess of overlapping items that's more overwhelming than useful. No exaggeration: The Overview list on my Lollipop-running Moto X has 80 cards in it right now. Eighty cards! When I wasreviewing the Nexus 6, it had 60 cards in the Overview list at one point -- 22 of which were various instances of a Google search process. The Overview list never seems to clear itself, either, even when you turn the device off.



Dozens upon dozens of often-overlapping cards -- there has to be a better way

(As I noted in my review of the OS a couple months ago, you can swipe items away one by one to dismiss them -- but that isn't really a scalable solution, and you as the user shouldn't have to worry about playing custodian throughout the day.)

The new Overview list could be a wonderful thing. With its current implementation, though, its unmanageable nature acts as a source of frustration and severely limits its productivity potential.

4. Nonfunctional notifications


Lollipop introduces a new type of notification known as a "heads-up" notification. It's meant to provide a less distracting way for you to see pertinent information, but in reality, it often does just the opposite.

With the new "heads-up" notification system, alerts for things like incoming calls, text messages, and calendar events appear as floating cards at the top of your screen -- on top of whatever else you're viewing. You can either tap them to open them or swipe them away to dismiss them.


The issue with this is two-fold: First, the "heads-up" card shows you only a tiny snippet of message-oriented notifications and provides no way to expand them and view their full contents without switching over to the source app (e.g. Hangouts, Gmail, or whatever is sending the alert). That's a step backwards in functionality from the old Android notification system, in which incoming messages would appear in their entirety within the top-of-screen notification panel (using a subtle scrolling mechanism when needed).

And second, if you're in the middle of doing something else on your device and don't want to deal with an incoming "heads-up" notification right away -- butdo want to keep it around so you'll remember to deal with it later -- your only choice is to stop what you're doing and wait about 10 seconds until the card disappears on its own, at which point it'll move up into your notification panel as a regular alert. If you swipe the card away, the notification will get dismissed for good.

For the "heads-up" system to work, we need (a) a way to expand incoming notifications and view them in their entirety (similar to the way we can swipe down on normal notifications in the notification panel to do just that) and (b) a way to push incoming notifi

cations upward to get them off the screen but keep them available in the notification panel. The current system just doesn't cut it and frequently feels like a worse version of what we had before.

5. Lock screen oddities


Along with Lollipop's new notification system comes a revamped lock screen that shows your pending notifications and lets you deal with them right then and there.

That's convenient in theory, but the current implementation has a couple of irksome quirks. For one, if you use a security pattern, password, or PIN, the new lock screen requires you to take an extra step every time you want to unlock your device: You first have to swipe away the initial screen -- where any notifications are displayed along with a large clock -- before you can input your code. Even if you disable lock screen notifications altogether, you still have to swipe away the clock before you can get to the security prompt.

Given how often most of us unlock our devices, that extra step can get annoying fast -- and there's no reason that disabling lock screen notifications shouldn't alsodisable that superfluous initial screen.

Even with lock screen notifications disabled, you have to swipe away an initial screen (at left) before you can input your code (at right). Why not just put the clock above the security prompt?
Beyond that, the Lollipop lock screen has a weird behavior in which swiping upward unlocks the device -- which makes sense -- but swiping downward takes you to a full-screen view of your pending notifications (essentially the same thing you were already looking at, only without the clock). The latter is quite confusing, particularly since there are no visual cues to indicate that'll happen and the behavior itself doesn't seem to serve any purpose.

Déjà vu: When you swipe downward on the main lock screen (at left), you see a full-screen view of your notifications (at right)

On my initial moments with Lollipop -- even as someone who's used Android for ages and spends hours every day dealing with mobile devices -- it took me a few minutes of trial and error to figure out what was going on with the different lock screen swiping behaviors. I saw the same thing happen to several family members and friends when they first got Lollipop on their devices, too, only accompanied by even more confusion (along with a puzzled glance pointed in my direction).

A little tweaking would go a long way in simplifying and improving that user experience.
All things in


As we wrap up this list of quibbles, let's be clear about one thing: Lollipop represents a foundational shift for Android, and by and large, it's an enormous leap forward for the platform. From its gorgeous visual overhaul to its numerous new features, the software truly is the start of a whole new chapter for the operating system -- one that presents ample cause for optimism and excitement.

But it's very much a beginning -- and particularly now that we've had more time to live with Lollipop and experience it on a variety of devices, it's clear that Google still has some work left to fine-tune the software and iron out the kinks. The good news is that the issues are all perfectly solvable -- and in the grand scheme of things, they'll likely become mere bumps in the road of Android's evolution.

With any luck, that pavement will be smoothed out soon.

Broken Lollipop: 5 things that need to be fixed ASAP with Android 5.0

9:02 AM
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