It hasn’t yet arrived in Australia — thought it may not be far off — but the Android 5.1.1 update for Samsung’s Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge has landed in the US, and it appears to be pretty decent.
Of course the headline feature is the version bump of Android 5.0.2 to 5.1.1, which (should) bring the fix for the Lollipop memory leak which plagued the release versions of both handsets. Other features include Lollipop’s Guest Mode, allowing you an easy way to hand your phone over to someone else to use without worrying about whether they’ll be able to access your personal information.
There are improvements to the camera function as well, with the addition of RAW support, manual selection of shutter speed, and for ultra-low ISO settings, down to ISO 50. There’s a twist here, though, in that the supplied camera app from Samsung doesn’t support RAW or ISO 50, but they are made available via the standard Android Camera2 API, meaning that third party cameras can access these features.
There has been a wrinkle with recent updates to the S6, which removed some quick settings from the drop-down notification slide. However, you can fix these easily enough with either a hard reset of your phone, or for those who don’t want to reinstall everything, you can download the QuickPanel Restore app from Samsung’s Galaxy Apps store.
