Android 2.2 'Froyo' beta hands-on: Flash 10.1, WiFi hotspots, and some killer benchmark scores

Much to our surprise at the time, when Adobe sent us a Flash 10.1-enabled Nexus One for testing, the phone came preloaded with a preview build of Android 2.2 -- a.k.a. "Froyo" -- the apparent turning point for curbing Android fragmentation due for a very public unveiling today at Google I/O. We've had a day or two to dig into it, and while we're surely missing some improvements here or there (Google was unable to provide us a changelog as of this writing), we've spent pretty much all our waking moments combing through every virtual nook and cranny. So what can Eclair alumni expect from the revised platform? Read on for more!

Android 2.1 Eclair vs. 2.2 Froyo... food fight!

Android 2.2 Froyo (unabridged)

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What's new

The first thing you'll notice with Froyo is a slightly modified navigation bar that assimilates shortcuts for both the phone and web browser. The Google search bar has undergone a slight modification, too, letting you cater your search specifically to web, apps, or contacts -- and that's about it for home screen modifications. No extra wallpapers, no additional screens, no new shortcuts. As for new widgets, all we've seen are a tutorial box and a rotating ad for featured marketplace apps.



Tethering and portable hotspot

Well, what do you know? Even seeing the settings sub-menu for tethering and portable WiFi hotspot functionality didn't completely convince us, but sure enough, we logged on to AT&T's 3G network without any issues. Security options are limited at this point -- it's WPA2 PSK or bust -- but that should be more than enough when your DSL goes on the fritz or you're stuck in traffic and need to do some heavy emailing. Let's see how long the carriers turn a blind eye on this one.

YouTube HQ (sort of)

Top row: Froyo (first with HQ enabled, then without; bottom row: Eclair (same settings on both screens)

The only other stock widget, aside from Google search, that had any noticeable change was YouTube, which now scrolls through a set of most viewed videos to entice and distract you on passing glances. The player itself, however, beams a shiny new "HQ" button on the bottom right of the screen. But before you go gloating to your EVO 4G-carrying pals, you should know that in our tests the higher-res option by and large matched the default (and thus far only) video option for Android 2.1 Eclair, and non-HQ was even more scaled down, and didn't even span the entire width of the 3.7-inch screen. And to think, the sight of that button alone gave us such jubilation. (Update: As a number of readers have pointed out, this change is nothing more than semantics -- the Nexus One does have the same low-quality option buried inside menus.)

External storage for apps

While support for apps on external storage is presumably intended for Froyo (the Manage Applications screen is now divided amongst Downloaded, Running, All, and most importantly, "On SD card"), try as we might, we couldn't find a single program that'd let us use the "Move to SD card" functionality. That includes marketplace and third-party downloads -- we'll have to explore this one later.

Everything else

Some of the other highlights, briefly:

• Camera: Controls are now more streamlined within the viewing window and much easier to sift through.
• Gmail: Previous and Next navigation in every viewed message, and a much more colorful means of sifting through labels.
• Calendar: The large green bars that took up much of the calendar space have been thoroughly fine-tuned into blue segments more indicative of the actual hour of day for each event.
• Voice recognition settings: Does voice search have a perceived issue with your accent or colloquialisms? New options for voice recognition let you choose seven different dialects of English (US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Generic), Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese. The latter worked quite well in testing, producing accurate Kanji for our horribly strewn together phrases.
• Security: Sick of locking your device with a pattern? PIN codes are now accepted.
• Car dock: A revamped interface spaces out the buttons, adds quick shortcuts to music and lighting adjustment, but decides it's probably for the best to disable the hardware home button in lieu of an easier-to-press "Exit car mode" screen key.

Flash Player 10.1

We have to say, it's really something to have a mobile browser that doesn't pop up little cubes with question marks all over the web, but we found that rediscovering Flash was much like reuniting with a high school friend; at first you've so much to catch up on, but then you realize how far you've grown apart. Adobe's pre-vetted list of Flash-enabled sites do a good job of showing off the technology, but we still can't help but think the interactive elements still have a lot of catching up to do. As for video, the stream is good quality but gets fairly choppy -- especially when you check out something "not optimized for mobile viewing." Some of the HTML5 footage we've seen via the same device shows up in crisper detail and fluidity. Battery and heat are also of concern: the pre-release beta we have, according to Adobe, lacks hardware acceleration. Ergo, our beloved handset got piping hot after about 30 minutes of heavy video watching, and the battery indicator in the upper right had a sizable dent.

Flash 10.1 for Android (press shots)

Benchmarks

So, does the new system run as silky smooth as earlier hinted at? In our tests, we were getting about the same Linpack scores as the early reports, which was over five times higher on Froyo than on Eclair -- and even more dramatic when you compare it with an Eclair-laden Motorola Droid. We saw similar results with a number of other benchmark tools, namely Sunspider and Benchmark Pi (unfortunately NeoCore, our favorite 3D test, kept crashing when we tried it).

Droid (2.1)

Nexus One (2.1)

Nexus One (2.2)

Linpack (MFLOPS)	4.53	6.928	39.72
Sunspider (milliseconds)	34,323	14,547	5,982
Benchmark Pi (milliseconds)	5,086	2,859	1,138

Notes: MFLOPS is millions of floating point operations per second (higher is better). Sunspider tests Javascript performance and Benchmark Pi measures calculations of the irrational number -- lower is better for both. All numbers shown are averaged from five tests apiece.

Of course, numbers are one thing, but how does it feel in practice? Frankly, we haven't seen that dramatic of a performance change. The full Engadget page consistently loaded a few seconds faster on Froyo, as did any other page we tried. Ditto for some of the more hardware-intensive games -- Raging Thunder II, for example. That said, fresh locations on Maps loaded just as fast on both versions, and we were hard pressed to find any other noticeable performance disparity.

Wrap-up

It's clear to us that, toying with the OS prior to Google's big unveil, we're not getting the whole picture of Froyo. But taking what we have here so far, there's a lot of promise (and certainly a lot of improvements on the backend). Some of the major aesthetic issues that have plagued Android in the past, however, are still out in full force. There seems to be no cohesive vision on how the platform should look and feel, and first-party apps run the gamut in terms of interface and design. The whizzes at HTC know how to work their magic with Sense UI, but what we'd really like to see is Google come out with an interface that'd prove much less tempting to cover up. Still, the narrative of this Brave New 'Droid is still being written, and this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Sean Hollister contributed to this report.

[Jacob1 Posted May 20th 2010 4:21PM]

@jacobtf Uh, you should probably look at the video. Flash works pretty well in the video, with only a slight amount of choppiness. And it's still a beta release, Flash will get better over time, especially when hardware acceleration is made available.

I don't get the hate. You can turn Flash off if you don't want it. But if you want or need it on an iPhone, you can't turn it on. I'd rather have it and turn it off when I don't need it than never have it at all.

[cjames Posted May 20th 2010 2:42PM]

when can I has Froyo?

[bravokiloromeo Posted May 20th 2010 2:51PM]

Who wants to wager a guess as to how long we Droid owners have to wait to get it?

[b00giZm Posted May 20th 2010 2:53PM]

Whooooooaaaaaaat?

Adobe fails to deliver a decent Flash implementation, but instead brings something that performs like sh*t, drains your battery in 30 minutes and turns your phone into a freakin hotplate?

Who would have guessed?




...oh, except this one guy out there in Cupertino.

What was his name again..? :)

[Good Times Posted May 20th 2010 3:09PM]

@b00giZm
But at least they got it right? ;P 5fps pornos lol. i hope they are able to disable it for the sake of there batteries..although i havnt seen anything official saying they can..who knows.

[jasev01 Posted May 20th 2010 3:15PM]

who is going to be the awesome person to hack me u a rom?

[desinerd Posted May 20th 2010 3:25PM]

Whenever anyone talks about Flash, they talk about streaming video. Video is not the only thing Flash does, and I agree that there might be better ways to do video in the future. Flash is important for animations, interactivity, games.

Some of my websites use Flash navigation (with HTML navigation as backup) and I can never create the kind of animations using Javascript; atleast not as quickly as I can create them in Flash.

[Jack Posted May 20th 2010 3:45PM]

"Battery and heat are also of concern: the pre-release beta we have, according to Adobe, lacks hardware acceleration. Ergo, our beloved handset got piping hot after about 30 minutes of heavy video watching, and the battery indicator in the upper right had a sizable dent."

I'm sure an update that runs efficiently, fast and cool is just around the corner.

[ipaladin Posted May 20th 2010 5:01PM]

@Jack We've been waiting for that for almost two years on Android, what makes you think it's right around the corner? I'd love to think the same, I just don't see it.

[lightforce Posted May 20th 2010 3:47PM]

OMG CANT WaIT TO LOAD THIS ON MY N1

[trutower Posted May 20th 2010 3:58PM]

looks so nice .... o wait music player

[doctah Posted May 20th 2010 4:45PM]

@Darkroom

= Dynamite. Dynamite.

[iPwnUK Posted May 20th 2010 4:47PM]

Wow... thats a lot better than the Android 1.6 i have on my iPhone 3G :P

[Dan Fruzzetti Posted May 20th 2010 5:39PM]

I bought an Android phone with the expectation that updating to a new version of Android would be like any other OS installation on a PC. Sadly, I was mistaken and I wish I didn't wind up with a Samsung Galaxy i7500 :(

[rav97 Posted May 20th 2010 6:16PM]

What version of the linux kernel is Froyo running? If it's 2.6.32, it should leave more ram free than Eclair, which uses 2.6.29.
The Froyo image included in the SDK has still 2.6.29.

[macboy988 Posted May 20th 2010 9:43PM]

Android will FAIL.


iPhone OS4 will blow away Android 2.2

[computerGod Posted May 20th 2010 10:12PM]

@macboy988

dude you are smoking crack!

[computerGod Posted May 20th 2010 10:11PM]

if you want to bench mark some games on android 2.2 check out http://nerdynerdnerdz.com..

[acomminos Posted May 20th 2010 10:44PM]

Does anyone else notice the dramatic signal increase with Froyo?

[stabbim Posted May 20th 2010 11:09PM]

OMG - we finally have a "select text" option in the Gmail app!

[Endurer Posted May 20th 2010 11:14PM]

I LOVE IT!!!

[lovehao929 Posted May 20th 2010 11:21PM]

i want to know about multi-touch issues?

[Guimo Posted May 21st 2010 1:10AM]

@Darkroom
Chuck Norris

[Johnny Rockets Posted May 21st 2010 2:21AM]

Wow, this is crazy.

With iPhone OS 4, Apple caught up to Google with several features.

With today's announcements, Apple just got blown out of the water... again.

Apple is LIGHT YEARS behind... again.

[Otakuon Posted May 21st 2010 11:39AM]

Mobile Wi-Fi is probably the coolest feature here. In fact, everyone phone with WiFi should have this feature. The problem is, carriers are reluctant to implement this sort of thing. And if they do, they will likely charge an additional $30/month to use it. It makes not sense: it's still the same data plan and wether I am using my phone or my laptop via my phone, I am still consuming the same amount of data and I am still going to be subjected to the same usage caps. I mean, your home broadband ISP does not charge you additional fees for each device that you have connected to your modem (although I am sure they would love to do this). One price for one data plan regardless of the number of devices that use it, please?

[Dignan17 Posted May 21st 2010 12:38PM]

I have a question about the hotspot feature: would someone at Engadget please try to connect to it using a Zune HD? When I had the Cyanogen ROM on a G1, I couldn't connect to it with my Zune HD because that WiFi app created an ad-hoc network, and the Zune couldn't even SEE that, let alone connect to it.

Please try it out!

[Dignan17 Posted May 21st 2010 12:40PM]

Oh, and one more thing: could you test the camera indoors? I'm really hoping they've fixed the "yellowing" of every single photo I take inside. It's awful!

[Brucealeg Posted May 21st 2010 4:35PM]

I don't think i see what some of you see. Outside of flash, most phones have these features like data sharing. I was getting pretty psyched for devices running Froyo and then I read Engadget / others previews and now I don't see the big deal. Flash sounds like a work in progress that's going to need more coding and better hardware / battery to get right. I don't know how Android / Froyo today isn't another case of me paying to be a privileged beta tester for Google. I love that there are 4.3 to 5in phones to choose from and then my excitement ends. I hear the Apple / WinCE7 hate and I just don't get it. A smooth functioning mobile experience with high quality software seems to be the goal of any mobile users, but that doesn't sound like Android yet. I look over the Android store and I see plenty of every day software to match Apple. I look at Apples store and I see Square RPGs, MMO's and generally more games then Android has apps. A lot of crap to be sure, so many things that dont even exist on Android as a wet dream. This fall MS will come calling and getting apps has never been a problem for them. I'm not sure what Googles answer to these guys are? They are the most open of all the closed system platforms? No one is truly open, they are just degrees of closed.

[Brucealeg Posted May 21st 2010 4:39PM]

@Brucealeg - PS, my apologies for that post running together like that. I didn't realize and I can't edit.

[Johnny Rockets Posted May 22nd 2010 1:26PM]

Can you test out Hulu in the browser?

Yes I know it's supposedly "blocked" but no one on the internet has yet to post a video of what *ACTUALLY* happens.

[illiniwatcher Posted May 27th 2010 4:23PM]

Can't wait! Take that, iPhone OS 4!