Android 2.2 is out and it’s rocking the world

This past week at the Google IO conference the new version of Android 2.2 “Froyo” was introduced to the world for the first time. Lots of great new features were showed off: Massive speed boosts because of Dalvik JIT performance enhancements, wired & wireless tethering, flash 10.1, “update all” for package updates and APPS2SD (installing applications to the SDCard). The word was that Android 2.2 would be pushed out in the “coming weeks”. Well Saturday morning there were reports that Google was starting to push out the release to the Nexus One. Shortly thereafter on the XDA Developer forum people starting posting links to the new ROM image and how-to’s to manually upgrade. I downloaded the new ROM image (about 44 meg in size) and followed this simple How-To. About 5 minutes later Froyo was running on my Nexus One. The speed increase is very noticeable especially with games. Video with 3D acceleration seems much much smoother. The web browser seems quicker and more responsive. This enhancement alone makes upgrading worth it. Flash on Android works very well. I went to a bunch of different web sites with flash content and everything seemed to work without issue. Hulu was the lone exception but it has nothing to do with flash on Android. Appartently Hulu tries to block video streaming to any mobile device. This simple little hack tricks Hulu into thinking your phone is a desktop. You can now watch flash based videos on Hulu. In some perverse twist of fate I wound up watching a flash based video of the iPad on my Nexus One. I’m still trying out the new features and enhancements but it’s very obvious that Froyo is a very important update to Android. I can honestly say Android has now surpassed the OS used on the iPhone. I’ll be sure to follow up with my thoughts on some of the other new features in the coming days.