If you've got a Motorola Droid you can now update to Android 2.2 (code name FroYo, although I tend to think all the food related code names are pretty silly) by downloading and installed the update direct from Googles servers. How so? Click here for details. I've seen several similar announcements for other models so if you're still waiting hopefully it won't be too much longer for you. So, how does the upgrade stack up?
First, speed. Yes, I think it is a little snappier. I had heard 2x to 5x faster because of the new Java engine. Don't expect a 'day and night' difference. One of my tests was with Homerun Battle 3D as I hoped the speed improvements would eliminate some of the lag in certain games. Initially performance was awesome. In fact I set a new record of consecutive Home Runs... 12 vs 5, but now things aren't too different so it was probably mostly because of the reboot and clearing out the running apps. App switching is a bit smoother and it's certainly not worse, but don't be thinking you're going to see a 5x speed increase.
Next, moving apps to the SD card... my biggest complaint has been rectified with 2.2. Or has it? Nope. Moving apps to the SD basically seems to mean Google provides some library support for moving a part of the game's data over to the SD card. For example, Crusade of Destiny is a 19 MB game... move it over to the SD card and it STILL consumes 7 MB of precious internal memory. I'm glad it can shed the 12 MB, but a) apps that offload lots of data to the SD card already such as Homerun Battle 3D will not benefit and b) it's still quite limited by the comparatively small internal storage of the Android. I had hopes of being able to download ALL of the apps I've paid for. No such luck and I feel that this had been sadly misrepresented in the media.
Flash support? It's there... had to download the .apk file from an external site (and it's a beta 3), but I just tried it on a favorite Flash game of mine. Everything is smooth except firing making the game unplayable, but it's impressive to hear the audio and see the animation as that's all very smooth.
All in all I'm a bit disappointed. Obviously it didn't cost me and I haven't lost anything with the upgrade (that I've noticed), but it's not the 'download a new phone' that it was advertised as being.
Copying full apps to the sd card is supported, but only if the application itself has supported it. Thus apps will need to have released an update. Apps that use the original incarnation of the Google copy protection will equally not be moveable; there is a new Google licensing system that does allow it, but it was only announced about a week ago.
ReplyDeleteWhat I'm looking at are apps that 'support' being moved to the SD card. Are you saying they, take my CoD example, could have allowed the WHOLE app to be moved over there, but elected to not allow that making the move to SD card only move part of it. I see that some apps can be moved to the SD card and some cannot (as devs have to update the app), but those that allow it DO NOT allow the ENTIRE app to be moved over from what I see.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, I had read about the new 'copy protection', but it sounds like the details as to offline app use are sketchy. Sounds like a lot of that will be up to the developer. With the ease of copying Android apps I'm a fan of this idea provided that it's not too heavy handed.
Having dug a bit further, I suspect the problem is this:
ReplyDelete"The .apk file is saved on the external storage, but all private user data, databases, optimized .dex files, and extracted native code are saved on the internal device memory." (see http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/install-location.html )