Samsung now pushing Marshmallows into the Galaxy S6, Edge

Android's jerky upgrade elevator has arrived at Samsung, which has decided it's time for the Marshmallow edition of the operating system to come to its Galaxy products.

Marshmallow was revealed in August 2015 and made it into Google's Nexus handsets six weeks later.

Fast forward another three-and-a-bit months and the world's leading supplier of Android-powered devices is ready to take the plunge, announcing that as of February 15th it is now ready for consumption on the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge.

Owners of other Samsung kit are promised “other GALAXY devices will soon follow” but the company isn't saying when. There's a commitment that “For upgradable models, Samsung will make separate announcements on details of OS updates schedule for each market according to market situation and carriers’ requirements.”

Which could mean years, or never, for some devices depending on carriers' whims.

The release of Marshmallow for the S6 and S6 Edge shows what Samsung cares about the most: user experience on the premium devices that drag in higher-margin customers to it and its carrier partners.

The S6 Edge gets special treatment, as Marshmallow brings the device a significant rework of the interface on the device's curved side screens. It's now possible to run the edge of the Edge at 550 pixels wide, sufficient to display snippets of news stories as depicted above (ore here for readers on mobile devices). Whether that's enough to make the Edge's edge useful remains to be seen: your correspondent uses an S6 Edge and never uses its pretty-but-impractical edge, which requires users to master new interface elements for little (IMHO) productivity improvement. ®