With the advent of Google's latest Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS, it's raining software updates as OEMs gear up to keep pace and update their devices to Android 5.1 Lollipop to lay the groundwork for the onset of the new OS.
Huawei too has taken the plunge and is now updating its US variant of the P8 Lite smartphone, which was lagging behind on Android 4.4 KitKat to Android 5.1 Lollipop.
"Starting today, Android 5.1 (Lollipop) is available to Huawei P8 Lite owners. Interested customers can download and install this current release version of the software now. We look forward to your feedback," notes the Chinese OEM.
However, there is a catch. The software update is a manual one and it will erase the existing data on the user's device.
Huawei warns users of the P8 Lite (ALE-L04) that they back up their data to an SD card before they flash the Android 5.1 Lollipop update as "Upgrade operations will erase user data."
There is no mention of an OTA Android 5.1 Lollipop update for the P8 Lite from Huawei in its blog post.
The software update has the build number ALE-L04V100R001C00B124 and P8 Lite smartphone owners are required to have a microSD to update. Huawei also advises that users deploy a microSD card that has at least 4GB space free.
For those wondering the need for so much free space - possibly because there are two files which one needs to decompress.The process is a tad complicated as one has to place the files in the appropriate folder of their microSD card.
The smaller file - which is the transfer package from Android 4.4 KitKat to Android 5.1 Lollipop - needs to be installed first to lay the foundation.Once a Huawei P8 Lite user reboots their smartphone they should copy the bigger file - which has the main build package - to the smartphone. It is only after these two processes are complete that one can flash the complete ROM.
The files weigh slightly over 1GB and once decompressed they are larger. They will only work if a user has the stock B124 firmware.
For additional installation instructions check out the guide from Huawei.
