Android 2.2 Froyo – Love it

I followed the upgrade instructions in this post. There were no issues with my Nexus One. Everything worked as described.

Rebooting took a while, but once it was back up, I was blown away. The performance is much better. I am working on my first Android app, and while I use the emulator for development and testing, I did deploy an early version that is full of bugs to the phone. One of the things that this version does is populating a ListView control with data that generates 4 exceptions per row. In the emulator this takes several seconds (on a Core-I7 laptop). In Android 2.1, it took about half a second. In 2.2, the list appears instantly.

The same improvement is noticeable in all other apps that I looked at so far.

The new home screen has the phone and browser apps always available at your finger tips. Very convenient. Gone are the days when I found myself searching for the phone app whenever I wanted to make a call.

The Flash Player needed to be installed. I found the instructions with a download link here. The installation worked flawlessly:

How cool is this – the Flash version of the SpeakEasy speed test running on my phone (via Wifi and my 25/25 FIOS service, of course – even on good 3G connections I don’t get anything close to this):

My favorite new feature so far:

Yes, there is tethering support out of the box (I have not tried it yet). And it can act as a Wifi hotspot!

My 2nd favorite feature:

Native Exchange Calendar Sync – I can finally get rid of the pesky Google Calendar Outlook sync client on all my computers.

Reports of more new features will be posted here as soon as I find them.