It's been a little while since we've heard from Motorola about its progress bringing Android Lollipop updates to its lower-tiered devices, but now there's some big news. The Android 5.1 Lollipop OTA update release date for the second generation Moto E (2015) is... now.

That's right -- according to Phandroid, users of the Motorola Moto E (2nd Generation) have reported receiving OTA updates to Android 5.1 Lollipop in the U.S.

Not that it's a particularly big surprise for this handset. We knew about and previously reported Motorola's strategy of leapfrogging older devices like the 2013 Moto X and the 2013 Moto G straight to Android 5.1.

And being a 2015 device running Lollipop out of the box, the Moto E LTE (for AT&T and T-Mobile) was guaranteed to get it. But being such an inexpensive device, it's nice to see the speed at which Motorola's device support rolled out the update.

The Android 5.1 Lollipop update comes with some improvements to the notifications and interruptions settings, especially one enabling your alarm to wake your device out of its anti-social "no interruptions" sleep as it wakes you up. Improvements to the quick settings' Bluetooth and Wifi toggles -- which now feature a pull-down menu to select between networks right in the quick settings panel -- are pretty nice too.

There are about a dozen other minor bug fixes and improvements for listed in Motorola's Android 5.1 Lollipop release notes for the Moto E (2015). But perhaps the best thing about this rollout is that it hints at more to come -- especially for first generation Moto X and Moto G owners waiting for testing to be completed so their leapfrogging can commence.