Yesterday, it was revealed that Google is shipping Android One handsets in Philippines with a newer version of Lollipop — Android 5.1 — that is yet to make its way to Nexus devices. Google has not made any official announcement about this new version of Lollipop so it is unclear as to the changes it packs and when the company intends to start rolling it out Nexus devices. Now, HTC’s VP of Product Management, Mo Versi, has revealed on Twitter that Google will be releasing Android 5.1 in March.
— Mo (@moversi) February 18, 2015 Mo does not mention anything about what the update will include, but he does call it “MR” in his tweet, which stands for Maintenance Release. This more than confirms that we are looking at a bug-fixing release from Google here. He also confirmed that the upcoming update will fix the capacitive buttons backlit issue on the Google Play edition One M7. Android 5.0 Lollipop was the biggest revamp of the OS ever since its inception and it clearly shows in terms of the number of bugs it ships with. The OS suffers from memory leaks that greatly deteriorate performance on high-end devices like the Nexus 9 over time. Additionally, many users have reported Wi-Fi issues, poor battery life, random reboots and more ever since they updated their device to Lollipop. It is more than likely that Google aims to fix these issues with Android 5.1. If Google does end up releasing Android 5.1 in March, it will be interesting to see if flagship handsets scheduled to be unveiled at MWC, including the Galaxy S6 and the HTC one M9, ship with it out of the box or not.
