A Taste of Froyo: Google Android 2.2 Explored
by Saumitra Bhagwat on June 23, 2010 1:03 AM ESTApplication Specific Updates
Gallery
The Gallery app now supports pinch-to-zoom gestures. When you pinch and zoom on an album, the pictures scroll across the screen giving you a preview of its contents. The order of the scrolling can be manipulated depending on how you pinch the screen. Google seems to have taken a page directly from Apple as the iPad has a similar feature in its Photos app. Although it’s a nice addition to an already well-made app, its implementation is rather awkward and leaves much to be desired.
Camera
The Camera app now has on-screen controls for focus, exposure, geo-location, white balance, flash and zoom. All the controls are orientation aware (regardless of whether automatic orientation is enabled) and change smoothly when you switch modes. Compulsive photographers who’d like to have greater control while taking pictures will find this extremely handy. I found the new controls quite useful at times, especially for those quick shots where time is of the essence.
Gmail
The Gmail app now supports fast account switching, thanks to a little button on the top right corner of the app. Google’s also (finally!) added previous and next buttons to quickly scroll through threads. The app also adds support for colored labels and allows users to cut, copy and paste text from emails. Another handy addition is the ability to install .apk files directly from emails. Thanks to these new features, the Gmail app is vastly more usable in Froyo.
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Android Market
The Market app at long last added the ability to update all installed apps simultaneously. The interface has now been tweaked to have two tabs, one for the description and the other for comments.
You can also set rules to automatically update apps whenever an update is made available. It’s a great feature if you have a lot of apps installed on your phone and something that is still lacking from iOS.
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YouTube
The YouTube app remains largely unchanged, except for that little HQ button that lets you toggle the video quality. While some have found the default video quality on v2.1 and v2.2 to be almost the same, but non-HQ clips seem to appear worse on Froyo.
Browser
Froyo’s browser adds the new V8 Javascript rendering engine that promises a 2x performance boost from Éclair (v2.1). I’m happy to confirm that these claims are largely true and the browser performance is absolutely stellar! The new broswer managed an amazing score of 36079 in the BrowserMark test with its closest competitor, the iPhone 3GS scoring a far 26897.
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The0ne - Thursday, June 24, 2010 - link
This is why I hate apps in general. For some of the most basic and common sense stuff, it requires apps to do them. Why? Is it so hard to type a number and have a list come up? Seriously?I need to apply to better design the UI. Personally, it's horrible and outdated.
bla5t3d - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 - link
Ummm my 1.5 Magic Sense UI has that? Or am I mixing this up with something else.dmjazzijeff - Wednesday, June 23, 2010 - link
While I'm not keen on Android (disclaimer: I've only had light hands-on time with a Droid while I configured it to work with a client's Exchange 2007 server), I have to admit that the Android WiFi hotspot feature makes me envious.Do the various and sundry carriers ding you with a tethering fee to cover this (AT&T, I'm specifically looking at you)?
How does battery life fare when you're using your phone as a hotspot?
keyibua - Wednesday, June 23, 2010 - link
Hello, summer, good place for shopping, fashion, sexy, personality, maturity, from here to begin. Are you ready?ScruffyNerfherder - Wednesday, June 23, 2010 - link
Please add performance comparison to iPhone3GS, iPhone4 and iPad.strikeback03 - Thursday, June 24, 2010 - link
right, I'm sure they are going to get right on comparing a pre-release OS to unreleased hardware.quasi51 - Thursday, June 24, 2010 - link
I'm in the market for a new smartphone but I need to be able to encrypt email on the device. I'd much rather buy an Android phone than an iPhone but I can't find any information on how to do this. This is available on the iPhone 3GS/4 with iOS4. Any suggestions for something similar on Android? As far as I know there aren't any Android devices with hardware encryption but I'd be content to try a software solution.Veroxious - Thursday, June 24, 2010 - link
I was hoping that the official Froyo release would have a native media player that could play divx etc......as this has been one of the big thing lacking imho.....that is the only thing I am soooo missing on this otherwise brilliant HTC Desire.Also a more simplistic manner of controlling data/updates etc via 3G. There have been many times where I just needed to do some 5 minute browsing using 3G only to have all the programs that access the internet starting up in the background and scoffing down megabytes that makes my head spin at the cost.
Lastly, no navigation in Google maps yet?
B3an - Thursday, June 24, 2010 - link
"However, things did get a little choppy on some of the more intensive websites like South Park Studios, which then, invariably took a toll on the battery life too. I’ll be honest, a warm Nexus One is not fun to hold in your hands...at all."You make it sound as if Flash is the only thing thats going to get the phone this warm. Playing Flash vids on Froyo does not drain the batter any faster than playing vids in a media player app, nor does it get the phone any hotter. The same goes for games.... but i dont see Apple not allowing video or games on there devices.
Flash on Android 2.2 proves very well how well Flash can run on a phone (with a touch interface too), and that Apple, as usual, are talking BS.
And i would have liked to of seen more on Flash performance in the article, not just a quick video mention on one site.
ScruffyNerfherder - Thursday, June 24, 2010 - link
"right, I'm sure they are going to get right on comparing a pre-release OS to unreleased hardware."Uh, that's what this article is all about (a pre-release OS, duh) which as of today is officially released to open source.
iPhone 3GS and iPad are already out (duh) and iOS4 for iPhone was released to the public earlier this week and has been available by other means for a while.
Many if not most of Anandtech reviews are done on hardware that has yet to be released to the public (duh). And we are talking a few days from release to the public (double duh). If iPhone 4 is still not available to Anandtech or they aren't allowed to publish numbers yet, that's fine, just compare to iPhone 3GS and iPad.
It seems like old news (go watch the Day 2 keynotes of this years Google I/O conference on youtube and Froyo 2.2 on Google Nexus performance is already compared to iPad) and Anandtech is usually on top of these type of comparisons. Maybe because its Apple, they are being extra super careful to get everything exactly straight before releasing comparison numbers and incurring the wrath of Jobs.
After tasting this Froyo article, I'm ready for the main course. Bring it!!!