What's new
Tethering and portable hotspot
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
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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
Sean Hollister contributed to this report.