Donner's Daily Dose of Drama

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 Android 2.2 Home Screen
The Android 2.2 Home Screen

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

Flash 101. Beta Installer

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):

Speakeasy DSL Speed Test on my Nexus One - the Flash Version

My favorite new feature so far:

Android 2.2 Tethering Options

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:

New Exchange Sync Configuration

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.

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