Samsung’s Galaxy S5 was – and will perhaps always be – a divisive flagship from the South Korean giant. It launched among ridicule from some for looking like a band-aid and well, it wasn’t the most attractive device that Samsung had ever shipped. Regardless, the Galaxy S5 gave Samsung fans a great fingerprint sensor, a good grip in the hand and a pretty excellent camera at the time. That was, of course, back in the halcyon days of 2014 and no company has changed the overall look and feel of their phones as much in that time as Samsung. Despite its age however, the Galaxy S5 is still being updated and those with a Galaxy S5 on Sprint will be getting the update to Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow right about now.
The new Samsung software version for this Android 6.0.1 update is G900PVPU3CPCA and Sprint is detailing a “phased roll out” of the update from April 7th to May 19th. That means that it might be some time before you see the update hit your device, but we doubt it will take as long as this for the majority of users to see the update. As is often the case with major software upgrades from Samsung, this will update the underlying Android software to the newer version, but leave most of Samsung’s software well alone. It looks as though this update will allow users to take advantage of Marshmallow’s “Adoptable Storage”, essentially merging a microSD card with the internal storage to create one central pot for apps and media, which is a damn fine feature to have. Elsewhere however, we’re looking at all the same sort of features that Marshmallow launched with last fall, including Now on Tap, Doze and the fingerprint scanner should become more useful here, too.
Sprint has been doing a pretty good job of getting software upgrades like these out to customers quicker than most other carriers as of late, and it’s nice to see a two-year old device continuing to get updates. It is however, likely to be the last update that the Galaxy S5 sees due to its age. This sadly means that the Galaxy S5 probably won’t see an update to Android N, but by the time that hits most devices, users of the Galaxy S5 might well have moved on anyway.