Android Lollipop Lands for the Sony Xperia Z Ultra

The undisputed king of the beasts–at least in Sony’s current stable, is the 6.4-inch behemoth known as the Sony Xperia Z Ultra. The sheer size of this device (and the lack of accessories to carry it outside of pockets) has been a major cause for the not-so-successful life of this phablet. Other than this, the device itself is a powerhouse worthy of carrying the “Z” denomination in its name. One of Sony’s most prominent moves in the past couple of years has been to be more forthcoming and open with the third-party developer community. They are getting faster at delivering updates and are releasing sources for AOSP projects for their hottest devices, so that devs can actually develop on them. While the Xperia Z Ultra has not yet been added to the growing list of devices in their GitHub, due to the similarities in hardware with the Xperia Z1 (for which sources have been released), XDA Recognized Contributor Saatvik Shukla has been able to successfully port the new OS to the device.

There are several things to keep in mind regarding this build, and the Xperia Z Ultra in general. Care must be taken as there are two variants of the device: the regular Xperia version and a GPe version. While they share some (most) of the same hardware, the partitions are different and, unless otherwise stated by the dev, cross-flashing between them can brick your device. The GPE supposedly should be out sometime soon, and the regular sometime in the near future. With that being said, for those of you eager to try this out, you have a good chance of getting a pseudo daily driver with this as it has most of the core functionality intact. The only things still missing are basically camera, GPS, and video playback which can be “fixed” by using a player other than the Android stock one such as MX Player. There are a few other not so critical bugs in there as well but nothing that is as critical.

The dev has stated that it should work fine and that the basic requirement is that your device needs to be bootloader unlocked to flash it. This is a very early beta (version 3 as of the time this article was written) and there are bugs that are to be expected. If you do run into more, undocumented bugs, please be sure to report them as well as you can, including logs whenever possible.

As for fellow GPe owners, hang in there… Google should release the GPe build soon. Happy flashing!

 

• Not working/Bugs

  • Video playback

  • Camera

  • Signal indicator is broken when connected to LTE

  • GPS

You can find more information in the original Xperia Z Ultra Lollipop thread.

The post Android Lollipop Lands for the Sony Xperia Z Ultra appeared first on xda-developers.

source: xdadevelopers