Everyone seems to be itching to get their hands on the latest new version of the Android OS, Android 5.0 Lollipop. Other than the lineup of Nexus devices that are slated to get it soon, the Nvidia Shield Tablet, and likely a few of Motorola’s devices like the current generation Moto X and Moto G, most other handsets that have been confirmed to be receiving the Android 5.0 software upgrade at some point will probably end up with it sometime next year. HTC is slated at 90 days out from when Google drops the factory images and OTA’s, and Sony themselves are looking at sometime around the beginning of 2015.
Sony currently though is actually working on testing Android 5.0 Lollipop on a few different devices, the Sony Xperia Z1, Sony Xperia Z2, and Sony Xperia Z3 devices. They aren’t running a Sony touched build of the software either, but rather the AOSP build of Android 5.0. This is Sony’s way of testing the software in a limited and controlled environment. Sony mentions that in part they’re doing this to celebrate the drop of the Lollipop source code from Google, they’re also running a beta testing program that lets them get consumer feedback on how the software is running on a couple of different Sony Xperia devices.
The beta program is called 3beta and is a pilot program they have running in Sweden at the moment, where they are giving a select number of Sony fans the opportunity to test drive Xperia Z3 and Xperia Z3 Compact devices running an early version of the AOSP Android 5.0 Lollipop build. Sony’s idea here is to gather as much information as they can about the early release so that they can provide the best user experience possible to consumers when they’re ready to release Android 5.0 Lollipop officially onto their selection of Sony Xperia devices. That want to make sure that things run smoothly, and we couldn’t think of a better way for them to test things out then to let select users in a certain region opt in to test an early build of the software on their devices. This gets real world human feedback on how things are actually running. Sony has a goal to bring Android 5.0 Lollipop to users in the beginning of next year, which seems like a fairly quick turn around.