 Here's a big question that's been facing Google for the past few years. Can it get better at design faster than Apple can get better at internet services? It matters, because Google's been trying to figure out what it thinks our digital future looks like, and it's only been getting it half right. But I've been using the new Nexus devices for over a week now, and you know what? Here's the definitive answer. Yes. This is Android Lollipop. By far, the most important change in Android 5.0 is something called Material Design. It's the philosophy behind the white cards, prevalent animations, and bold colors you'll run into everywhere on Lollipop. The idea is that your phone has a magical, paper-like material that makes up all of your digital stuff. It moves, it can be stacked on top of things, and it obeys its own peculiar laws of physics. It takes a little getting used to, but Google has helped by suffusing the entire experience with animations that show what's going on. Buttons expand into sheets, panels slide away like pieces of paper on your desk, and apps fly up from the bottom of the screen, which is where a stack of them happen to live for multitasking. All that movement is pretty, and it's great for teaching you what's going on, but after a while you kind of want to tell Android that, hey, I get it, let's move it along a little bit faster. It's also impossible to talk about this big visual overhaul without talking a little bit about the iPhone and its huge visual overhaul, which came last year with iOS 7. Both OSes have embraced layers, and you could say that both are kind of flat, but Johnny Ive's mission at Apple was to get rid of real-world skeuomorphism, and in doing so, he created a crystal palace of cold, colorless, translucent panes floating about. But if Apple's built a crystal palace, Matthias Duarte at Google has created the mushroom kingdom. Everything is bright and feels alive, so much so that it feels like it's just about to topple over into cartoony garishness at any moment. But it never does, because you can tell there are rules here that keep this slubber from bouncing around too much. That's not to say there aren't rough edges, because there definitely are rough edges. It sometimes feels random what colors are popping up from app to app, and text selection can still be inconsistent. The font weights and overall balance of text could use some tweaking. I'm looking at you, keyboard and settings. And who knows when all the third-party apps you use will feel native again. It's going to take some time. All those visual changes would be enough, but there's also a ton of functional changes here. There's too many to go over in one sitting, and that's not even touching the backend stuff like the Android runtime that makes apps go a little bit faster. But let's dive into some of the big stuff. Notifications are way better on Lollipop. First of all, they appear properly on the lock screen, and you can interact with them right there without even unlocking your phone. You can set some apps to be private, too, so they don't show their content on the lock screen. There's also a new thing called priority mode, which is essentially like a do not disturb setting, but the neat thing is you can set a timeout on it. Google always messes with quick settings, and they did it again here, too. It's fine, but you can't customize it, and that's still pretty aggravating. But Android has improved security features in a big way. It's encrypted by default if you set a password, and now you can add multiple users to your phones. There's even a guest mode so you can safely hand the phone off to your friend. Battery life seems to be better overall, too, thanks to a bunch of improvements Google calls Project Volta. It does a better job of showing you how much time is left and how long it will take to charge, and there's also a new battery saver option. Overview might be my favorite new feature. It replaces the old multitasker, and it's just plain fun to swipe through your apps. But the new addition is that some apps, like Chrome or Gmail, can put more than one card right in the stack of apps, which makes it super easy to multitask. Google is calling Lollipop Android 5.0, but I've basically given up on believing those version numbers mean very much. For the past several years, we've had 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, but each of those were really big updates, and we're way beyond 5 important versions for the OS. But whatever, 5.0 is a huge update. It's so fluid and so colorful that you need a little while to adjust. It's like waiting for your pupils to contract when you walk outside into the bright sunlight. But once you're used to it, everything else starts to look a little dim.