Android 5.0 Lollipop on the Nexus 4

With the Motorola-made Nexus 6 starting to arrive in customer’s hands, the Nexus 4 is hardly noteworthy anymore. It’s screen was a measly 720p and measured 4.7-inches with a pixel density of less than 320. With a quad-core Snapdragon APQ8064 processor clocked at 1.5GHz and an Adreno 320 GPU, LG‘s Nexus 4 was a powerhouse – back in its day. It shipped with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, but got fairly timely updates all the way up to Android 4.4.4 KitKat.
Then tragedy struck. Google’s support window on devices follows the industry standard of about 18-months. The Nexus 4 was announced in October of 2012 – 24 full months ago. The pundits were quick to proclaim that Lollipop certainly wouldn’t be made available for such an “old” device.
Fortunately, back when it was announced, “Android L” was touted to be optimized such that even very low-end equipment could run it. The Android One initiative was announced with the aim of bringing Android-powered handsets to emerging markets. Since the “lowly” Nexus 4 had specs well above those announced for inexpensive Android One handsets, the optimists among us started to gain hope. If people weren’t confident that Android 5.0 Lollipop would run well on the Nexus 4, how could Google possibly expect us to buy in to the concept of Android One handsets?
In a stroke of good luck, Google did just that: releasing Android 5.0 Lollipop for not only the Nexus 4, but also the 2012 Nexus 7 tablet. (How’s that for confidence?) But how well does it run? Go ahead and hit play and see just how well Android 5.0 Lollipop works on the 2 year old Nexus 4.
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