[Nexus 5 General] gsmyth:
Just a few thoughts on 5.0. I have just jumped from an M8 to a N5 a few weeks back and loving the stock android experience and ease of unlocking bootloader/rooting etc.

Was using LiquidROM as thats what I use on my N7 2012 as it has plenty of customisation features. Flashed xtraSmooth the other day to try it out and 5.0 looks pretty good. Visually it reminds me more of what you would find on an HTC rather than vanilla android, Google have really tried to brighten things up and obviously polished things quite a bit.

I like that they have tried to simplify things quite a bit, they have combined the pull down toggles/notifications drawers. Although it can feel like extra swipes are needed like when you swipe the notification/toggle drawer down completely and hit back or swipe up, it goes back up but stops to show any notifications or 'no notifications' message and needs another swipe to hide. I would prefer it went completely hidden again, but Im guessing this may be something that can be tweaked once the devs start putting together the custom roms.

The recents menu looks slicker (definitely reminds me of apple's cover art preview) and holds a lot of recent apps and thats with the individual chrome tabs off. The thing I find annoying is when looking to jump to the settings you could (on KK) switch to something like the wifi/display/app settings and hit the back arrow in the top left hand corner to get into the main settings menu, but this back arrow seems to have been removed. And so you need to hunt through the recents menu looking specifically for settings, or obviously you can swipe to get to settings from the notification drawer or even just use the settings short cut on the desktop. Nothing major but just things you notice after using for a few days.

In battery stats they also removed the 'time on' from a charge and instead now displaying the 'time remaining. I usually install gsam battery monitor so can see more detailed battery info, but dont understand why they removed this useful bit of information. :confused:

They also seem to have removed face unlock, never used this feature apart from trying it out, but again another thing they removed. I like the notifications on the lock screen and in general. Not sure I like the exclamation mark over the network data icons in the status bar. Ok it tells you data is switched off but you usually know this anyway as the wifi icon isn't showing or the H, 3G, 4G, LTE icon isn't showing above the signal strength bars, so not sure what the point is? Think it would also be better to hide the profile/user pic on the status bar if you're not using multiple profiles or have a guest set up. I know it only shows in the lock screen and notification drawer, but again whats the point when you're not using it, just creates confusion.

Overall it definitely feels like a lot of thought was put into material design and the look of the interface, compared to pre-5.0 which is very minimalist/barebones/blank canvas, not necessarily in a negative way. More than ever they have tried to create a 'googleyfied' android in terms of pushing their services/apps and OS as a product. Thanks if you took any time to read this. :D

---------- Post added at 10:43 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:31 AM ----------

Have you tried the usual changing the speed in the develop settings? I always find setting to .5 helps. I find them relatively smooth overall, some things bug me but are not necessarily new, like the play store opening animation. The way the top title bar (with menu icon, play store text, search icon) flickers white on opening, why can it just open with the colour already or a fade would make it a bit smoother. I would also liked an option for the lockscreen clock animation zoom out. It looks/works well and Im glad google changed from the lock ring to a swipe up but think it would be slicker/simpler if it just faded to the home screen.

Also when the screen times out, it dims very low first and lightens up a bit before going completely dark. Annoying when you see it flashing out of the corner of your eye.