The 2012 Nexus 7 is more than two years old now, and it hails from a time when Android was still trying to find itself on tablets. Perhaps as a result, it feels older than it is. It's showing its age in a way that the 2013 Nexus 7 (or any given iPad from 2012) isn't yet.

When you've been reviewing stuff for a while, you get better at determining the relative strengths and weaknesses of a device after spending only a little time with it. The majority of the time, those strengths and weaknesses don't change much after a few weeks or months of use, but the older Nexus 7 is an exception. Though it was initially praised widely by reviewers for its speed, over time that reputation shifted. Now, it's known mostly for being annoyingly laggy and slow, a problem we can pin on its poor storage speeds.

Because of the tablet's age and its documented performance problems, it was a bit of a surprise to learn that it would get an update to Android 5.0 at all. As we did for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 when they got iOS 8, we've done some comparative testing between KitKat and Lollipop on an 8GB Nexus 7 to how much of a difference it makes. We're hoping it won't be much.

Upgrading

We flashed our Nexus 7 to Lollipop as soon as the official build leaked, and there are just a couple things to note that we didn't talk about in our Lollipop review yesterday. First, encryption won't be turned on by default. We've seen a lot of confusion on this point so far, but the "default" device encryption that Google advertised as part of its Lollipop PR push is only going to be a feature on new devices.

Existing devices can be encrypted, but users will still need to do it manually. This is true whether you download an upgrade over-the-air, flash your device with a factory image, or even do a full reset from the Settings menu—we've confirmed this behavior on both Nexus 7s, the Nexus 10, the Nexus 5, and the 2014 Moto G. If it didn't ship with Lollipop, it's not encrypted by default.

Second, the 2012 Nexus 7 didn't come with the Google Now Launcher, so by default it's still using the same basic home screen that came with Android 4.3 and older versions. It's an easy download and once you've turned it on it works the same as it does on the Nexus 5, 6, or 9, but Google still isn't including it on older Nexuses that didn't ship with it in the first place.

Otherwise, you're getting the same Lollipop features that every Nexus device is getting, minus a few things the Nexus 7's hardware doesn't support (no Bluetooth 4.0 because it would require recertification with the FCC; no OpenGL ES 3.0 or 3.1). It's mostly small stuff.

Screen, performance, and battery life

At 216 PPI, the 2012 Nexus 7 is the lowest-density device that's gotten Lollipop so far—all the others are around 300 PPI and up, and going higher than that has less-visible returns. Lollipop makes more liberal use of light fonts and thin lines than older Android versions, but luckily even on this screen there's nothing in the OS itself that's hard to read. Some elements of the UI have a little fuzziness to them—the small superscript numbers across the top of the keyboard, the little text labels in the Quick Settings, certain bits of text in Google Now—but none of it looks particularly bad or gets in the way of using the tablet.

As for performance, the bad news is that things are a little slower, but the good news is that the differences are usually pretty tiny. We took out a stopwatch (well, a stopwatch app) and clocked cold boot times and launch times for several applications. We timed everything three times each and averaged the results.

Application Android 4.4.4 Android 5.0 Chrome 2.28 seconds 2.58 seconds Gmail 2.25 seconds 2.5 seconds Calendar 1.58 seconds 1.7 seconds Maps 5.52 seconds 5.43 seconds Photos 1.95 seconds 3.0 seconds Hangouts 2.35 seconds 2.3 seconds Play Store 2.4 seconds 2.5 seconds Settings 1.1 seconds 1.3 seconds Cold boot 46.33 seconds 67.9 seconds

Actually booting the device gets drastically slower. Lollipop takes around 20 more seconds to boot, adding around a third to an already pokey 46-second startup time.

For everything else, Lollipop takes a little longer to load most things, but overall performance hasn't degraded much. Some of this may be because Google's update procedure is so much different from Apple's at this point—though the OS versions differ, all the apps were actually identical, since Google has issued Material Design updates to most of these apps through the Play Store at this point. With the exception of the Photos app, you can measure the slowdown in just a couple tenths of a second, which isn't a difference that normal people are going to notice.

That said, even without much slowdown the Nexus 7 is still a poor performer. The Tegra 3 SoC itself, while pretty old at this point, is capable of rendering Lollipop's numerous animations perfectly smoothly, but as soon as you start actually using the tablet for stuff performance falls off a cliff pretty quickly. If you're using one app by itself, things aren't too bad—in Chrome, sometimes the tablet takes a fraction of a second before it will begin scrolling, or maybe the keyboard might hesitate for a moment before popping up. Switch between a couple of apps or try to use an app while data syncs in the background, and things get much worse. The screen won't respond to input. The keyboard can't keep up with your typing. Animations become choppy. The Nexus 7's slow flash storage is a big bottleneck here, and when you're trying to multitask it drags everything down.

So, no, it's not a pleasant experience and even the one-year-newer 2013 Nexus 7 is a drastic upgrade that still glides easily through anything Lollipop throws at it. But none of these problems are new. The 2012 Nexus 7 had the same multitasking hiccups in KitKat and later Jelly Bean releases, so it's not surprising that they continue in Lollipop.

Finally, battery life. Early testing based on the first Android L developer preview suggested that we might see a big boost in runtime from "Project Volta," Google's initiative to reduce Android's energy usage. So far, we've been unable to reproduce that boost in the release version, at least in our standard battery life tests (the light Wi-Fi browsing test, and a new WebGL test that puts a moderate, continuous load on the CPU and GPU).

Our 2012 Nexus 7 lasted for almost exactly seven hours in both KitKat and Lollipop in the Wi-Fi browsing test with the screen set to 200 nits, and about three hours and 40 minutes in the WebGL test. Remember that this is a two-year-old battery, so your particular Nexus 7 may do better or worse than ours, but in any case it won't really get better or worse. We're going to continue monitoring battery life on our devices and we should have more data for you in the coming weeks.

Lollipop won't slow you down

Between this and the Moto G, we have gotten a pretty good idea of how Lollipop is going to run on older and midrange hardware, and we feel comfortable saying that anything that can run KitKat well should run Lollipop equally well. Android 5.0 doesn't fix any performance problems, but it doesn't seem to introduce any new ones, either.

Your experiences on the 2012 Nexus 7 may be different from ours, particularly if you have the 16GB or 32GB models—their storage speeds were still pretty low, but they were measurably better than the 8GB model. In either case, Lollipop does little to save or ruin your tablet. Go ahead and upgrade. If you absolutely hate Lollipop, you can always use a factory image to roll it back.