I just got the N update last night. I'm...meh on it. I'm not really a fan of the new notifications. They're...blockier? I think they've gone too far in the flat design direction. There's a lot of white space, and it seems like fewer notifications fit on the screen at once. They also feel more difficult to work with, but that might just take some getting used to.

One thing that bothered me tremendously at first was that I thought you couldn't access the quick settings shade from the lock screen. I do this all the time to adjust the screen brightness, turn on the flashlight, or put the phone in priority mode all without having to unlock the phone first. But when I dragged the shade down it would always pop back up in a behavior that made it seem like it wasn't allowed until the phone was unlocked. I even went to the Google Groups about it and a very helpful person told me to try stopping my finger swipe about half way down the screen. It seems I was pulling the shade TOO FAR and it was popping back up again.

This is just annoying because it's clearly a new behavior. It didn't function like that in the previous OS version, so they purposefully changed this. It seems to me that pulling all the way down would make it even clearer what my intended action was, but apparently not.

*end rant*

Anyway, I can't really tell if the phone is faster but it sort of feels like it. There are minor things about the new notifications that I like, like the ability to perform actions on individual emails when there's more than one.

I also like the ability to edit the quick settings shade. So far I've only removed location services (I never turn that off) and added Chromecast.

Other than that I can't even tell what's new. Does anyone have a good summary of the new features?