Owners of the Samsung Galaxy S5 in the United Kingdom can now count themselves among the lucky few with an Android 5.0 Lollipop update.

Samsung released the upgrade Tuesday, January 13, making the United Kingdom one of its largest markets to receive the latest version of Android. The popular South Korean electronics manufacturer has already rolled out Android 5.0 Lollipop to other regions in Europe and Asia, including Spain, Russia, Poland, and Malaysia.

The update has been confirmed to be available for download over the air (OTA), although it's important to remember not everybody will receive the new firmware at the same time. Companies typically push new Android versions in indiscriminate batches, meaning some will get it before others. Oh, and this doesn't apply to carrier-tied variants, which will have to wait for their networks to sort things out.

There's also one other thing -- the upgrade is Android 5.0. Google's Nexus devices are (for the most part) running Android 5.0.1, while the 2012 Wi-Fi Nexus 7 is actually on Android 5.0.2. A large part of the 5.0.1 and 5.0.1 firmwares are fixes for bugs that Lollipop brings, but Samsung seems to have opted for releasing it now rather than working on the more recent 5.0.1 and 5.0.2 codes. This is because Samsung has to integrate the new Android version into its existing TouchWiz interface - a process that's hard to keep up with when Google gets to produce incremental versions that fix stock bugs.

Speaking of TouchWiz, the new update brings a new version of TouchWiz to the table that works better with Lollipop. TouchWiz, Samsung's in-house front-end interface, is still much like it has been, although that may all change in the coming year. The company's next flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S6, is rumored to feature a streamlined version of the interface so that it does not eat up as much memory and have so many gimmicky bells and whistles.

There's still no word on a U.S. release date for a Galaxy S5 Android 5.0 Lollipop update. There usually never is.

On top of that, U.S. consumers own a large amount of carrier-tied smartphones thanks to high prices and subsidies from contracts. What this translates to is a long wait time, given the fact that even if Samsung has a Galaxy S5 Android 5.0 firmware worked out, the carriers still need to go through to optimize and approve it. It's really up to Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile at this point. 

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