What a great weekend! Got a tweet (Shout out to @nigelwill2001!) on Saturday night that FroYo (Android 2.2) was released to the wild. Something we Nexus One owners had been waiting for with bated breath.
It was a manual update, and it would have gone without a hitch if I hadn’t been rushing out the door for dinner with friends at the same time (RTFM!). Here are the instructions - very straight forward.
So, what does “FroYo” mean? The clue is in the picture…Frozen Yogurt. (2.1 was codenamed “Eclair”.)
Even though the revision only went from 2.1 to 2.2, the changes are impactful.
Performance has improved a lot. According to Laptop Magazine, their benchmarks show that overall, FroYo is 4.5x faster than Eclair (remember, they have the same Snapdragon 1GHz processor). I’ve only been using the phone for a few minutes. It does feel faster, but that could just be the placebo effect 
The new OS supports Flash 10.1 - so Youtube, and all of that Flash content out there should be better. I have experienced issues with flash in the past on the N1, so hopefully this will clear all of that up. It’s still a beta from Adobe, but I’ll take it.
What I’m really looking forward to is tethering as I’m out and about a lot! I’m using it now, and it’s working great. I can also turn my Nexus One into a portable WiFi hotspot. With my unlimited data plan, it makes for some interesting potential business issues for T-Mobile…maybe. Or maybe AT&T at Starbucks.
I’m really jazzed about automatic app updates. It sounds small, but given the almost bi-weekly rate of development-release of phone apps, this actually improves the UX a lot.
Hats-off to Engadget for their really useful list that compares the two revisions with side-by-side screenshots. And TiPb for the really cool walk through video - enjoy! I’ve gone through all of the features and love it!
Posted under Gadgets
