In my humble opinion — FroYo rocks!

26.05.2010

FroYo (Frozen Yoghurt) is the name Google gave its new Android 2.2 Release.  FroYo is like each previous version a mixture between API Changes, new Userfeatures and some new cool Apps.
So, let’s divide this review into theese several specific parts and some addons at the end:
First, the imho, absolutely most important part, the Enterprise Features:
New API-Features:

  • Data Backup API
  • Possibility to save passwords secure

New User Features:

  • updated Exchange Features
  • Remote Wipe

Furthermore there are, of course, some more, not so enterprisy features 😉 :
New Apps:

  • Camera and Camcorder updated (possible to enable manually the leds for usage within camcorder)
  • Android Tethering and Usage as Hotspot

New User Features:

  • Flashsupport , Airsupport (useful?)
  • Possibility to save Apps on SD-Card
  • JIT Compiler (hey this improves performance 3-5 times!!!)
  • HTML5 compatible browser?
  • With FroYo, users will be able to sync their local music collection with their Android device and stream wirelessly.
  • Users will also be available to backup their Apps in the Cloud
  • Android 2.2 finally supports multi-language keyboards too!
  • a lot of cool Marketplace updates (Webmarket like Androidpit.de and Search and Categories! and One click to update all, allow automatic update!!!! )

And now some more rumors on what helps FroYo being the Apple poison 😉 :

  • Kernel 2.6.32 will also improve speed for snapdragon processor smartphones like the Desire or the Milestone
  • Developers will be able to implement Services which interact with kind of Push Notifications. The killer here is that this works bidirectional so that apps can also notifiy of feed Webapps in the Cloud with data! Interesting could be if Google is here open minded enough not to chain this, imho killerfeature, to Chrome.
  • Browserapps are able to use camera or sensors directly via JS! Is this the end of Tools like PhoneGap?
    For those who like it … the new Google Buzz app should be much better than the crappy web version.
  • Rumors told also  that the new market is able to keep parts of froyo OS up to date automatically… could help to reduce device fragmentation!!!

As you can see, the list of new improvements is very long and in my opinion this is only the start of a little revolution. All theese new features will enable Android Smartphone for a wide variety of really cool apps which we actually never thaught about because it was just not possible to implement  ’em… we will dig more into Froyo if the first updated Smartphone is available for us at Synyx… so stay tuned…
As addon, today the first Nexus One users told about their experience after the update… read more
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=686591