If you’re familiar with Android, you might already know that version 5, also known as Lollipop, was re­leased back in late 2014.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S4, and every time I went to check for updates, it said that I already had the latest version, even though I had Android 4.4.4.

Today, it finally updated itself to Android 5, and it’s a pretty huge change.

Overall, I think I like it because it seems a bit cleaner and more organized.

I’m personally big on distinct contrast because I think it makes things more crisp and easy to see. I think each individual item should be easy to separate from another, and contrast helps out in that regard quite a bit.

Ironically, it seems like Android 5 has reduced variance of contrast, but for some reason I’m not having too much difficulty telling apart different on-screen elements.

The first thing I noticed that I really like is the changed look of the QWERTY keyboard. Version 5 has much smaller keys than version 4.4.4, which makes it a lot easier to type. Not only is there less possibility of unintended key presses due to being off-center and accidentally touching borders between keys, but it also forces more accurate key pressing of there being less buffer space on the edges of the key.

Unfortunately, not everything is amazing, and the biggest issue I have is a buggy gallery. Every time I open my gallery, all my images appear gray, and I need to wait several seconds before they start loading up.

On the topic of pictures, the Picasa integration also seems to be gone. Now, the only way I can integrate with Picasa and manually backup my photos online is to either use the Photos in Google+ (which doesn’t let you pick the album to which you’re uploading), or to get a separate third-party app (which I did).

Another buggy thing I noticed was the display of widgets. Not only were the widgets moved to a different location (now they appear when pressing and holding your finger on a blank space on your home screen, and I’m not sure which location I like better, the new one or the old one in the apps menu), but they don’t always pop up.

Immediately upon updating, my parents’ weather and alarm widgets disappeared, and I had to manually add them back onto their corresponding pages. Mine was fine at first, but my weather app randomly disappeared after a period of time.

I tried Googling why this was happening, but all I found were basic solutions (like just dragging the widget back where it used to be), rather than possible explanations as to why it was happening.

In order to try and catch potential problems with the new operating system before I fell victim to them, I looked up common problems and bugs with the new operating system, but all of them seemed to be problems that couldn’t really be avoided with any preventative measures, and they were problems that I didn’t encounter even though I tried to intentionally reproduce the problem.

Overall, I’m content with the new update, because the useful things are actually quite noticeably con­ven­ient, and the problematic things are either bearable or have workarounds.