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Android 5.1 Lollipop comes to the US Huawei P8 Lite

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Huawei launched the P8 Lite here in the US over the summer. And for some reason it launched with Android 4.4 KitKat, instead of Android 5.x Lollipop. What made it even stranger is the P8 Lite launched in Europe launched with Lollipop. Well now, the company has begun rolling out the update to the US variant of the P8 Lite, however there are a couple of caveats here. One, and this isn’t a major one really, it’s a manual update. You will need to flash the update manually, and you’ll need at least 4GB of space on your microSD card to be able to flash it. Yeah, it’s not the best process. Hopefully Huawei pushes out the update as an OTA soon, as it’ll be much easier for users.

There’s another caveat with the Android 5.1 Lollipop update for the Huawei P8 Lite, and that’s the fact that the update erases all of your data. Yeah, you read that correctly. So make sure you back-up all of your data before attempting the flashing of the files for this update. Now it shouldn’t touch your microSD card, but you’d better offload that data somewhere else just to be safe, because well you never know.

This definitely isn’t the best way to push out an update to a smartphone, Huawei. Hopefully they’ll learn, but this is sure to anger a lot of customers. And the fact that this is only for the US variant makes it a bit more puzzling, as we’ve seen OTA’s for other Huawei smartphones in other countries not have to go through this. And just download the update over-the-air like normal. We’re hoping that this is just for those early adopters that want to get their hands on the Lollipop update ahead of time, before it rolls out to everyone. We’ll have to keep our eyes open and see what else we can come up with on our end.

Of course, Huawei does have a Nexus available with Android 6.0 Marshmallow on it. So hopefully they’ll get better when it comes to updates, and getting them out faster. The P8 Lite is available on Amazon now for $249.99.