Google is expected to unveil the details for the next version of its Android mobile operating system (code-named Froyo) soon. But Ian Douglas has already gotten his hands on a Google Nexus One with Android 2.2 Froyo. It supports Adobe Flash, and he reports that it runs very smoothly.
There’s a non-disclosure agreement preventing Douglas from spelling out all the new features found in Froyo. But he did share the results of some benchmarks. And it looks like the Nexus One with Android 2.2 managed to outperform the same device running Android 2.1 by a staggering 450 percent.
Clearly, the operating system doesn’t do anything to change the processor or other hardware. But Google is apparently offering a new Java compiler which appears to be blazing fast.
Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that every single thing you do with your phone will be 450% faster. It’s possible that some applications may not take advantage of the speed gains. And there’s a big difference between the speed with which a processor can calculate and the perceived speed for end users.
But as the folks at Android Police point out, an HTC Hero scores about 2MFLOPS using the Linpack benchmark. The Google Nexus One with Android 2.1 gets about 7 MFLOPS. And it’s one of the fastest Android powered phones on the market today. With Android 2.2, the Nexus One score jumps to 37-40 MFLOPs. It’s hard to imagine that kind of performance gain not making a huge difference in real and perceived speed.
The biggest gains are expected to be in apps that are not compiled in native code.
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