Froyo no-no

So now that I’ve had a chance to play with the Froyo Update on my Motorola Droid, I have a few comments.

First, I am happy to report that I was among the first to get the official update for the Droid phone. Many people, like me, have patiently waiting for the official OTA upgrade (instead of downloading the unofficial version and roting rooting my phone) and to have to wait while others were upgrading would be quite frustrating. It’s like being at the back of the line at Yogurt Mill on a hot summer day.

Now on to the features I so looked forward too.

Exchange support had no effect on me but I had set up my work email and calendar to sync with my phone (just in case). The first thing I noticed was that my office calender and my Google calender merged into one calender. Useful, yes – but I suspect there are a lot of people who would like to keep them separate. I’m sure this can be done but I think it’s odd that it did it automatically.

Home Screen improvements are nice. I like having the ‘phone’ and ‘web’ buttons on all 5 screens plus the navigation between windows is better with the addition of ‘page dots’. So you can slide from one screen to anther or tap the lower corners to move between screens. Also, the apps screen is a lot better looking. The pitch black background seems to make things look cleaner and sharper in contrast to the dark gray background from the previous version.

Camera and Gallery changes are nice. Having the camera options right there on the screen means I’m more likely to make on the fly changes but I most likely will stick with auto settings. Still an improvement, though.

Portable hotspot and USB tethering was the biggest disappointment. Verizon says that the Droid simply doesn’t have the hardware capability to support the WiFi hotspot feature. While this may be true technically, people have been able to do this already with apps like PDAnet – but this method requires software be installed on your computer, which may be the difference. And USB tethering appears to be an extra service you have to pay for. This is NOT cool. I’m sure this will be changed pretty soon as the uproar is likely to be quite loud.

Improved performance is noticeable but somethings took a while to load the first time. I chalk this up to internal syncing/caching. I haven’t really tested this out or don’t proper comparative speed analyses but I’m sure it will become more evident the more I use it. Of course, I’ll quickly get used to the speed and begin to find it too slow before too long.

Flash 10.1 support is not automatic. Apparently, the Flash 10.1 support is part of another upgrade.

Adobe? Flash? Player 10.1 for Android 2.2 has been released to partners.

The upgrade path for your phone depends on the specific device, manufacturer, operator and the region you are in. If your device has already received Android 2.2, Adobe Flash Player will be coming soon.

I’m sure there’s other features I haven’t tapped into yet (and I may never) but as I find them, I’ll let you know about it.