Andre Yoskowitz
7 Jul 2010 0:42
HTC has explained this week why the company's phones are seeing a "slow" rollout of the upcoming Android 2.2 firmware update, going as far as to say that the Gingerbread 2.5/3.0 update may be pushed back until 2011.
Says Eric Lin, HTC's global PR and online community manager: "It takes time to port all of our applications over to Froyo and then make sure that it is running well on each of our devices. That’s not like a one week kind of project. We need to make sure that our applications are taking advantage of the Froyo features. To make sure that they’re all running properly on the OS now that it’s a new version. And then to make sure that it's running on our hardware as well as we expect".
Lin did promise that the update would be quicker than past updates, like from 1.6 to 2.1: "I don’t think you’re going to see that really long six month, seven month lag, like you saw in the updates from 1.6 to 2.1, simply because it’s a less severe change. Switching from 2.1 to 2.2, they made a lot of tweaks, but they didn’t make any gigantic changes, so it should be a much swifter process."
There are many new features that most users have been expecting and wanting. The main two are the addition of Flash (built-in) and the addition of Wi-Fi tethering. Additionally, Apps2SD, desktop to handset music streaming and a "one-handed camera UI" are part of the update.
On the performance end, a new Dalvik JIT compiler will give 2.2 users a 200-500 percent performance boost over those using 2.1. The HTML-5 supportive browser will give 300 percent performance boosts for JavaScript.
As for Gingerbread? "I don’t think so. I don’t know what Gingerbread involves, but I would believe that we would be done with our Froyo updates before Christmas. And since Google hasn’t made any announcements as to when Gingerbread is going to come out, I’m not going to make that guess, it could be Q1 of next year".