Android Froyo And Nexus One: Everything We Know
This is an effort from my side to consolidate everything about Android Froyo with respect to Nexus One. It is mainly concentrated towards listing the features/fixes that we have seen in Froyo that weren’t announced in Google I/O, things that work with nexus one, things that don’t and possible fixes/workarounds known, what the announced features actually feel like in real use etc.** Will keep updating this post as I get more info, get more fixes, etc. Please do let me know if I’ve missed something or there is some new development that should be updated here.**
**UPDATED: **
27-MAY-2010 (Added things missing since Eclair and few other notes)
25-MAY-2010 (Added market missing apps fix, 802.11n and other features)
24-MAY-2010 (Added more un-announced features/fixes/changes)
To start with, just a quick recap of things that were announced and their look/feel/working in real use (First is the announced feature and then after “:” is the effect that we see)
| Feature/Fix | Real Effects seen by us | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| JIT for Dalvik JVM | Apps are quite fast, visible difference animation effects, scrolling, games etc | None |
| Better Exchange support with calendar sync/GAL /remote wipe/account-auto-discovery/administation | Works as advertised | Exchange support still not upto the mark. e.g. No support for selective folder sync, subfolders are not synced automatically, no phone number/location for GAL contacts, no “move to folder”, no search, etc. |
| Backup Application data/settings/history in cloud | Yet to experience | I’ve enabled the settings for this but haven’t switched to another ROM yet or figured out how to test it in some other way. |
| Cloud Messaging to activate intents | Works as advertised | very cool feature. Try out this chrome extension to send links from chrome to your phone: Chrome2Phone |
| USB Tethering and Portable Wireless Hotspot | Works as advertised | Real skin-saver. Works great and easily. |
| Javascript V8 Engine for Android Browser | Much faster javascript execution | Much better browsing experience noted. |
| HTML5 support/Device Access (Camera/Accelerometer etc) through Browser | Work In Progress. See Remarks | Contrary to what many people tell you, this is still not there. HTML5 support is an ongoing thing and device access through browser would be present in Gingerbread (Next Android iteration, supposedly 3.0) |
| Better Voice Input Integration | “Seems” better. | Now, I don’t have any tangible means to measure this but it seems to be working relatively better and it even seems to understand my non-US accent much better. |
| Flash 10.1 beta support | Works as advertised | Almost every flash functionality in all sites I visited work ok. Please note that you need to install Flash from market as it doesn’t come “built-in”. Just search for “Adobe” in market. |
| Install apps on SD card | Not tested. | This feature requires support from apps to integrate this and currently no apps support it. There is a command that you can run from adb shell “adb shell pm setInstallLocation 2” but it will cause “all” your apps to install to the card plus users report problems on missing apps as SD card is not available immediately at boot up. |
| Better global search integration for apps | Works as advertised | Now, apps can allow search to search within their data. Right now the official twitter app supports this and you can search your timeline from the main android search itself. |
| Update all apps in one click/automatic updates | Works as advertised | None. |
| Stream music from PC to phone | Yet to test. | None. As pointed out by Hugo, it is not clear yet that this is supposed to be part of Froyo or GingerBread. |
| Improved crash reporting to developers | Works as advertised | Really useful to the developers as it sends complete report about the environment and stack trace etc. |
| Purchase music/apps on android market and push directly to device Over The Air | Yet to test | New market website that allows this hasn’t appeared yet. As pointed out by Hugo, it is not clear yet that this is supposed to be part of Froyo or GingerBread. |
Now, we move on to things that weren’t announced but we found them in the updates. This may be because these pieces were too small or specific to nexus one to have warranted a place in the Google I/O keynote.
| Feature/Fix | Remarks |
|---|---|
| Erratic/Crazy Touchscreen behaviour fixes | This is about the erratic behaviour of the touchscreen that sometimes all the touches were being registered at the wrong places and one had to tap twice on the power button to fix it. So far, it seems that this has been fixed. |
| Multi-touch fixes | This seems to be a hardware problem and there are no “fixes” to it as such but there seems to be a new touchscreen API in the 2.2 Froyo SDK that google is encouraging developers to use to alleviate this issue somewhat by doing some filtering/scaling within the Android framework. |
| SMS App fix | The messaging app had a nagging issue that many times it showed the first few words of a text message as the sender instead of the actual number/sender. This seems to be fixed now. |
| Capacitive Touch Button fix | Nexus one was quite famous for its mal-functioning cap-touch buttons that didn’t seem to register the touches of a user. We had to press slightly above them most times to register a touch. This seems to be fixed now and feels much better. |
| Multi-Color Trackball | The nexus one trackball can now display multiple colors instead of just white. e.g. a nee facebook update received makes it glow blue :) |
| Better Camera/Gallery Interface | The new camera/gallery interface is just awesome and much easier to use. Feature wise I think the new options are focus settings, zoom settings and storage location quick switch, flash on during video recording for night video capture. I must also mention that auto-flash works much better now as earlier it used to almost always fire even in quite ample light but that maybe just me. |
| Bigger Camera Pics | Somehow the pics are a bit heavier in size. Earlier a max resolution, finest pic used to weigh around 900-950 kB for me but now they are around 1.09-1.1 MB |
| Keyboard Quick Access to numbers/punctuation | Now, you don’t need to switch to the number mode by pressing “123?” key to input number/punctutation. Just press anywhere on the keyboard and drag it towards the preview/suggestion bar upwards and two new rows will appear with numbers and punctuation. |
| Library Projects | This is something for the devs. Now, you can create library projects so that you can make a library and share it across your different apps. e.g. you can use same library of code for your paid and free versions, etc. |
| wi-fi n | yes, it supports 802.11n now :) |
| End call with power button | You can enable this in accessibility settings |
| vcard support | Nexus one can now handle vcards that someone sends through sms or bluetooth for contact information |
Now, on our list are things/apps that don’t work or issues that plague the new update. We will also be listing the workarounds/fixes if known for them.
| Issues | Fix/Workaround/Remarks |
|---|---|
| Seesmic app keeps giving “Connection error” with froyo | Simple fix is to delete your existing account in seesmic. Setup a new account and uncheck “Secure connection” in advanced setup. |
| Swype doesn’t work | Just uninstall swype and swype installer and download/install them again and it will work. |
| Pure Calendar doesn’t work | New versions have been released to make them work |
| Android market doesn’t show a lot of apps | As of now, android market is not showing a lot of paid/copy-protected apps on the market for froyo users. There is a workaround for root users available here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=687371 |
| Worse radio/3G performance | Several users at modaco/xda-devs report worse performance with 3G. They say downgrading back to previous radio fixes this but try it at your own risk. |
Things missing since previous versions (i.e. Eclair):
| Things missing |
|---|
| No “.com” button on the default Android keyboard |
The final part of this post is for things that were rumored to be in the Froyo update for nexus one but aren’t present:
| Rumored Feature/fix (Not present in Nexus One Froyo Update) |
|---|
| FM Radio Receiver |
| FM Transmitter |
That’s it for now. This is a huge post and I must have missed out on a lot of things for sure. So, if you remember something that I have missed or something has changed over past few days after I wrote/updated this post, please do let me know in comments.