Moto Droid gets Froyo
Around 5 am this morning my Droid popped up with a system update: 2.2 was finally here! Of course I had to install it immediately and see what kind of new goodies were available. I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it but here are some first impressions and highlights:
- More home screens - five instead of three now, and a quick navigation bar at the bottom to get around.
- Quick button – instead of just the little app tab, there is a button at the bottom of the screen with quick access to Phone, Apps, and Browser. Long pressing the App button brings up a snapshot of all five home screens.
- Phone – there is now a Favorites tab with your most accessed contacts.
- USB tethering!
- Camera – load time is much faster, and the pullout menu to adjust flash, focus etc. has been replaced with small buttons on the main screen. You can easily adjust flash, timer, white balance, zoom and GPS.
- Gallery – fixed an annoying bug where web album photos took forever to load.
- Multitasking – long pressing the home button now brings up eight apps instead of six. Minor improvement, but how long did the iPhone wait for task switching?
- Swype – still not available by default on the Droid, but I am on the beta program. I had to reinstall Swype because it detected the OS was different and refused to work. The keyboard would show but tracing resulted in zero output. After grabbing the installer again and reinstalling it worked fine.
- Exchange Mail – typing an address in the To: field now searches the Global Address List (GAL), but you still cannot just do a GAL search. Yes, better than no GAL at all, but it would be nice to have full search capabilities so you can view other contact information (phone, fax, address, etc) and add the contact to your local contact list. Touchdown is still my app of choice for Exchange mail.
The responsiveness is as good or better than 2.1, though there are some apps that seem to lag a bit at times (Touchdown, Dolphin Browser HD). This is probably just a result of some APIs that the developers need to update. Overall a good experience though!
