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Another day, another report of a smartphone manufacturer planning to roll out the Android Lollipop update to their phones. This time around it’s Oppo. No wonder there are reports of Android KitKat finally losing market share for the first time, in the face of growing uptake of Lollipop both through updates of older devices and through sales of new devices that come pre-loaded with the latest flavor of Android.
Timely updates haven’t always been Oppo’s strength though, with updates to their heavily customized ColorOS typically taking much longer than the update cycles of most other major OEMs. They were amongst the last ones to have rolled out KitKat to their devices with ColorOS 2.0 and now that Lollipop has been out since the end of last year, they are yet again amongst the last of the bigger OEMs who still has not been able to roll out Lollipop for any of their phones thus far, but that is about to change soon.
According to an official post on Oppoforums, ColorOS 2.1 (based on Android Lollipop) is in the works for devices like the Find 7, but it will still take some time coming. According to the post, “ColorOS V2.1 based on Lollipop is still being baked by our engineers and we will need a few more weeks before the public release”. So with that still up in the air, Oppo users would have liked an idea about which devices are in line to get the update, but even that information wasn’t forthcoming. While nothing concrete was said about either the estimated time of arrival (ETA) of the update or the devices likely to receive it, there were some indications about the design elements and the visual changes that the update is likely to bring. The default home page icons will be bigger and brighter than the last time around according to the post and the second level interface will also see a “subtle change of small icons”. The post also showed off a few of the default wallpapers that are going to be included with the update. The only thing that remains to be seen now is how quickly Oppo can actually roll out this update for their customers. Some of the screenshots of ColorOS 2.1 posted on Oppoforums can be seen below.
