You can either tap them to open them or swipe them away to dismiss them. With the new "heads-up" notification system, alerts for things like incoming calls, text messages, and calendar events appear as floating cards at the top of your screen - on top of whatever else you're viewing. It's meant to provide a less distracting way for you to see pertinent information, but in reality, it often does just the opposite. Lollipop introduces a new type of notification known as a "heads-up" notification. With its current implementation, though, its unmanageable nature acts as a source of frustration and severely limits its productivity potential. The new Overview list could be a wonderful thing. (As I noted in my review of the OS a couple months ago, you can swipe items away one by one to dismiss them - but that isn't really a scalable solution, and you as the user shouldn't have to worry about playing custodian throughout the day.) The Overview list never seems to clear itself, either, even when you turn the device off.Äozens upon dozens of often-overlapping cards - there has to be a better way Eighty cards! When I was reviewing the Nexus 6, it had 60 cards in the Overview list at one point - 22 of which were various instances of a Google search process. No exaggeration: The Overview list on my Lollipop-running Moto X has 80 cards in it right now. The problem is that the Overview list quickly turns into an enormous mess of overlapping items that's more overwhelming than useful. If you open Gmail and then start to compose a new message, for instance, you'll see a card in the Overview list for both Gmail itself and for the individual message. Part of that means that Overview no longer contains only apps, as it did in previous versions of Android instead, it now splits apps apart into multiple steps, each is which is represented by a separate card. You can then jump directly to any of those tasks on demand, regardless of where you are in the system. The basic idea is that the Overview button - the command next to the Home button, also sometimes known as Recent Apps - brings up a scrolling list of cards with all the processes you've used recently on your device. Lollipop's expanded approach to multitasking is one of those things that's great in theory but not quite there yet in reality. This may be less of a bug and more of an odd design decision - but whatever you want to call it, it needs to be fixed. (On tablets, bafflingly, you can still activate a silent mode by lowering the volume all the way until the device goes into vibrate-only and then pressing volume-up once from there. That's an awful lot of work for something that should be so simple, though - and again, it's something most ordinary users aren't going to figure out. The only other option you have is to configure Lollipop's "Priority" notifications setting so that it'll allow alarms to sound but nothing else. The search for silent mode on Android 5.0 And on top of that, the "None" notifications setting prohibits even alarms from sounding, while a traditional silent mode does not. Instead, you have to first press your device's volume-up or volume-down key and then select the new "None" notifications setting - which isn't at all intuitive and is going to confuse the hell out of most ordinary users. And the power button shortcut is no longer present at all. On Lollipop, lowering the volume all the way on a phone gets you to a vibrate-only state - but there's no way to move from that to silent. In past versions of Android, you could either just lower a device's volume all the way down or long-press the power button and use the direct shortcut there to activate silent mode. Lollipop's new notification system is plenty powerful, but it's lacking one fundamental option: a simple way to set your phone to silent. And suffice it to say, that isn't a good thing. The fact that these things are now happening on multiple devices - including both those designed for Lollipop and those that didn't have such issues prior to running Lollipop - seems to indicate that it's a broader OS-level issue as opposed to anything limited to one particular set of hardware. As a result, you'll sometimes experience things like recently used apps "refreshing" and starting from scratch when you return to them, music-streaming apps like Google Play Music or Pandora randomly closing when they're running in the background, the home screen taking a moment to "redraw" itself when you return to it, and system-level actions like loading the Overview list acting less responsive than they should. In short, Lollipop - on some devices, at least - seems to have trouble keeping processes running in active memory.
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