Sony has shown some serious commitment to their mobile division despite their devices not selling as much as they would like. The company has proven that it can create beautifully designed and well-built hardware by the use of premium materials, although some might argue that their design language is getting a little dull. An example of this is their most recent flagship, the Xperia Z3+ (or Xperia Z4 in Japan), which features very few changes in its hardware compared to its predecessor. Regarding the software, Sony was one of the last companies to update their flagship devices to Android Lollipop and since then, a new update for the operating system has arrived fixing some issues and including some minimal visual changes.
Some devices with the Android 5.1 update have been seen since May and last month, we heard that Sony would start updating the rest of their Xperia Z lineup as well as some other devices this month. Now, Sony Japan has published information about this update regarding all the changes, although that information is targeted to users of their tablets who are still on Android KitKat, so they mention changes in the iconography and the whole new notification system, among others.
The changes from Android 5.0.2 to Android 5.1.1 for the Xperia devices are not as noticeable, but they include the new sub-menus for the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth icons in the Quick Settings menu that let you switch from a connected network or a paired device to another without going into additional menus. There are also some more changes to the iconography from the Settings menu, adding some more color and consistency to the menu, some animation changes here and there are also expected. The information on the site mentions that the update will start rolling out in late July, and it seems that Japan is one of the markets that get these updates later than others, so we could expect to see this update hitting some devices in a near future. Once again, most of the better-known OEMs are already updating their devices to this new version of Android, so Sony should hurry to update theirs to keep being competitive.