A Taste of Froyo: Google Android 2.2 Explored
by Saumitra Bhagwat on June 23, 2010 1:03 AM ESTFlash 10.1, Tethering & Hotspot Support
Adobe has taken much trashing from Apple lately due to inability of Flash to deliver a smooth user experience on mobile devices without sacrificing battery life. With Froyo, Adobe has teamed up with Google to prove them wrong. While Adobe’s claim that 250 million mobile devices will be Flash-enabled by the end of 2012 seems a little far-fetched, the Nexus One and Froyo seemed to handle flash quite well. 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.
USB Tethering & Wi-Fi Hotspot
I believe this is one of the greatest additions to Froyo and an incredibly useful one at that. It allows you to share your phone’s GPRS or 3G connections via Wi-Fi to other devices by turning the phone into a wireless access point. Although it only supports WPA2 at this point, the feature itself is a lifesaver when your internet service goes out (like right now, as I write this article). Thumbs up to Google for including this!
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Enterprise Features
Since I’m not important enough to have an exchange account, I haven’t been able to test the new features like support for Exchange calendars and remote wipe.
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probedb - Wednesday, June 23, 2010 - link
A handy article being as I'm about to buy an HTC Desire.Finally why is there no way to report spam posts? The two above me blatently are spam.
Brian Klug - Wednesday, June 23, 2010 - link
Just nuked 'em ;)Cheers,
Brian
hughlle - Wednesday, June 23, 2010 - link
"but this is largely attributable to the responsiveness of the screens being used in many Android devices. One of the main reasons why navigating the iPhone is a pleasure is because of the incongruously more accurate and responsive capacitive display"so the negative side of the screen on the android is that it is too responsive, and apple is better than them because of their phones being so responsive? sounds kinda contradictory.
it also comes off as if trying to say that iphones have a capacitive display and other phones dont. my htc's capacitive display is just lovely.
SkullOne - Wednesday, June 23, 2010 - link
I agree with that. My Droid running the leaked FRF57 is very responsive. I have zero issues controlling the touch screen.Froyo is visibly faster then Android 2.1. Most apps don't make use of the JIT compiler yet but then again Froyo isn't officially released so that will change.
I do enjoy Flash 10.1 Beta 3 immensely. Battery life isn't hit that hard and it's nice being able to actually browse the Internet without blue blocks everywhere. The plug-ins are able to be set to "On Demand" as well meaning if you don't want Flash loading automatically it doesn't have to. Flash ads aren't an issue either due to other applications on the Android Market. ;)
kenthaman - Wednesday, June 23, 2010 - link
I agree. My Droid has been running exceptionally well with FroYo installed on it. I do however have to say that after initially loading it the responsiveness when scrolling through my app menu was still sluggish, but since the package that I installed is rooted I installed one of p3's kernel packages and the Overclocking Widget and now have my phone set to 1.1 Ghz rather than the stock 550Mhz and this effectively removed nearly all lag that I've experienced.On a different note I have noticed a few things that still seem glitchy and expect that this is simply due to the beta (read:unofficial) image. Specifically I have been unable to install the latest version of Google Maps (4.3.0) from the market it downloads and attempts to install, but then reports installation unsuccessful. I'm not too worried about this as other apps have installed fine and again this isn't a final product.
Stuka87 - Wednesday, June 23, 2010 - link
I believe what he means is the majority of the android phone screens lack responsiveness. And that the iPhones screen surpasses them in this regard.And test done by other sites show this. The Nexus one screen is the closest out there to Apple in this regard. The Motorola Droid on the other hand was extremely bad. Which I notice every time I use one. This test was run before the Incredible came out however, so its quite possible its much closer to the iPhone. And in my experience using one briefly, I would say its pretty close.
pdusen - Thursday, June 24, 2010 - link
The Motorola Droid screen is extremely bad? Come again? What universe are you living in? Have you ever even been in the same room as a Droid?IanCutress - Wednesday, June 23, 2010 - link
Nice write up. I'm still waiting for my Hero to get 2.1 here in the UK - should be sometime before July, but they've put the date back six times already. There's also no plans to move to 2.2 on the Hero, which is a shame if the JIT in 2.2 is that much better than 2.1. May have to root and flash, see what that does.Ian
dguy6789 - Wednesday, June 23, 2010 - link
I believe there is a typo in the performance section of the article. It is mentioned that there is a 60% boost in performance in the Sunspyder and BenchmarkPi when the numbers in both of those tests show more than 100% speed increases.hughlle - Wednesday, June 23, 2010 - link
wrong way around. higher to smaller.if something takes 10 seconds to complete and you get it to do it in 5 seconds, it is a 50% increase in performance. same applies for those benchmarks.