A Late Night Froyo Treat Android 2.2 Goes Live On The Nexus One

http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/22/android-froyo-nexus-one/

by Concours • 16 years ago

26 41 16 years ago

Tichy2• 16 years ago

Why do they "roll out" in such a weird way - why not make it available to everybody at the same time? Surely Google doesn't have bandwidth problems?

No update available on my N1 yet :-(

kelnos• 16 years ago

Yeah, same here (US west coast). I wonder if there's a difference between N1s bought outright, and N1s bought under T-Mo contract.

ergo982• 16 years ago

Probably to limit the damage if somehow the rollout is destructive, as sometimes they are.

studer• 16 years ago

And to avoid having millions of phones hit the update servers and all other parts of the serving infrastructure at the same instant. Internet-scale engineering involves more than just the size of your widest pipes...

brown9-2• 16 years ago

What sounds more frustrating is that the availability of the new OS depends on your phone manufacturer

gvb2• 16 years ago

Well, the phone manufacturers have to port Android to their phones, so updates won't be available until the manufacturers apply their porting mods to the update and then push it out. That is the down side of not buying a Nexus One (G1). That is also the reason I was disappointed when I read Google is shutting down their phone hardware sales.

Unfortunately, manufacturers tend to lose interest in supporting their hardware after the initial sale is made. The classic example is all the printers that worked fine under XP, but the manufacturers never bothered to create Vista/Win7 drivers, so they became paperweights).

The Google reference phones have the advantage for updates since, by definition, Google has already done the porting for those phones. In theory, Open Source has an advantage since the community can do updates. That theory is tempered by the reality that the community needs to include people that are capable of doing the porting and enough hardware information needs to be available for people other than the manufacturer do do porting.

arantius• 16 years ago

It is not (directly) dependent on the manufacturer. It's dependent on how many barriers your manufacturer and/or carrier put between the original Android source, and your phone.

In the case of HTC phones with Sense, they have to add a lot of engineering work between "Android version is available" and "that version has Sense added". They need to make sure all the hardware drivers still work, update them for updated kernels, etc.

If the phone is a "Google Experience Device" then it's very close to the original source, and should get updates sooner than the rest.

bobbyi2• 16 years ago

Why pay for QA when you can use unwitting customers as guinea pigs?

bwr• 16 years ago

I thought Google usually publishes an update image that you can flash yourself if you don't want to wait for your turn in the roll out?

mbrubeck• 16 years ago

They did for the Android Dev Phones, but haven't for the Nexus One. (This is the first Nexus One update.)

nuclear_eclipse• 16 years ago

Correction: there was an OTA update for the Nexus One a few months ago to try and resolve some issues regarding EDGE/3G transitions, and a few other htings.

ergo982• 16 years ago

This guy got an Evo 4G at the Google I/O -- are we sure he didn't also get a N1? Google did mail out N1s and Droids in advance. If it was an N1 handed out at IO, not really surprising if it got the update early.

I'd like to hear reports of non-tech-reporters-who-went-to-IO getting it. For the record my N1 is still telling me no updates are available.

axod• 16 years ago

I was at I/O. They first gave out N1/Droids in advance, then announced we could all have Evo's as well.

My N1 says "Your system is currently up to date" :/

stanleydrew2• 16 years ago

It's very possible that he has a pre-release N1. I think Arrington got one. And I know Google is pushing out updates to those phones now.

keltex2• 16 years ago

I'm beginning to think this whole Android 2.2 thing was planned from the get go to take as much wind out of Apple's sails as possible.

Google knew when Apple's big announcement was going to be and most likely they had a good idea what it was going to be about (iPad / iPhone 4.0). So they let Apple do their thing and then after the media frenzy had died down a bit, made their big announcement. Of course Google I/O was already planned so that made the perfect forum to make their announcement.

Now to add insult to injury, the week after they talk about all the new features, they actually release them. Apple's iPhone 4.0 OS is not due until this summer and now when it comes out it will already be behind Android 2.2.

I'm not taking sides here, but certainly see it as a PR victory for Google. What I'm seeing out there is more Android news than iPad news.

mechanical_fish2• 16 years ago

So, waiting until a lull in the press cycle and then making a big announcement is a hostile PR move? What would a polite PR move look like?

Google staged a major Android conference and made a major release. Of course there is more Android news this week than iPad news.

Google timed their conference and their release to avoid Apple's big April and May releases, and to avoid WWDC and Apple's (presumably forthcoming) big June release. This isn't particularly hostile or non-hostile; it's a basic law of PR physics. The influential tech reporters are human beings that can only be in one place at one time.

(It may be an even more fundamental law of physics: There is only one Moscone Center.)

Finally, since I'm not trying to sell page views I'm free to point out, once again, that selling smartphones is not a zero-sum game. I doubt that Google's efforts to mention Apple and Apple's products in every other sentence is particularly bad for Apple. By elevating Apple to the level of "the industry standard which we all must compare ourselves to", Google buys attention for themselves, but they also ensure that even more people will pay attention to Apple's next move. It's really kind of a win-win. The ones who aren't winning here are Microsoft, RIM, and HP/Palm: The unmentioned ones.

keltex2• 16 years ago

You keep repeating "hostile" like I used that word in my comment. I didn't.

e40• 16 years ago

Isn't this a page out of the Jobs playbook? I recall after the Moto Droid PR splash there was a very interesting Apple leak, like 3 days later. And this is not the first time I remember this happening.

kaiser5• 16 years ago

I also wondered ... is there no firmware to download and flash on your device? We have a nexus in the lab and I would love to try froyo out.

With Apple, you always get the new versions/betas the same day they are announced and can play around with them.

Could also smb. help me, I'm new to Android and I'm just wondering how easy is it to flash my custom firmware on a google nexus (bought over the web store)??

kaiser5• 16 years ago

found the link for the firmware: http://android.clients.google.com/packages/passion/signed-pa...

rufo• 16 years ago

Froyo looks like a great update, but I'm not clear on why it's the game-changer/straw that breaks the iPhone's back that everybody seems to think it is. Is there something I'm missing here?

elblanco5• 16 years ago

Simple, look at the feature list for Froyo. All things the iPhone most clearly does not do.

Even discounting flash, these things are among the most requested things that people want their iPhones to do: like tethering, wi-fi hotspots, jit, media sync OTA, media streaming OTA, flash 10.1, web app access to the compass and camera, voice to voice language translation, etc.

It's not necessarily that it's "better" than the iPhone. It's that it squarely does all of the things that Jobs artificially prevents the iPhone from doing that consumers actually want.

kaiser5• 16 years ago

sorry, my iphone tethers since 3.0 (depends on the carrier :) the media sync and streaming sound lie an awesome feature.

Considering flash ... I find it sad, that google is actually supporting it. Where is the open standards idea there??

Other than that, I'm happy about the competition. Hopefully makes Apple to include some of this features. Yet, I don't see the UI on Android getting any notable improvements in Froyo :( Maybe I need to play with it, as soon as it's available.

KirinDave3• 16 years ago

Why would the iPhone need to JIT? Everything is native. Did you just get caught up in the listing of features and let that one slip by?

P.S., V8 is not, strictly, a jit'ing interpreter; Nitro is. That doesn't necessarily mean SFE/Nitro is better, just that it's more of a classic interpreter and V8 is actually something more akin to ObjC but with compilation happening as soon as the code is available. The tradeoffs involved are beyond the scope of your chastisement.

bobbyi2• 16 years ago

Does it come with Flash?

stanleydrew2• 16 years ago

Yes.

gvb2• 16 years ago

Can it be disabled?

ZeroGravitas• 16 years ago

Anyone know what the story is on a UK Vodafone Nexus One? My wife might be buying one and I hear the upgrades on Android can be disruptive so I'd rather get it done sooner rather than later.

A Late Night Froyo Treat Android 2.2 Goes Live On The Nexus One

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