Android 2.2, Froyo, is faster, more powerful and has a lot of Impressive Features

At the Google I/O Developer conference, the Internet Giant announced the release of Android 2.2, Froyo, the next major update. In any computing device, good speed is something which is always appreciated and Android 2.2 comes with some impressive speed and performance improvements along with a bunch of new features. It also introduces a few new APIs giving more power to application developers.

Froyo is the seventh major release since Android 1.0. Because of some improvements in the Dalvik Virtual machine, the platform/core on which Android applications run, Froyo gives three to five times better performance than Android 2.1, Eclair. Such a performance boost will drastically improve the performance of applications running on it providing a far better user experience.

In addition to this, the developers have also optimized the browser. It now uses the V8 Javascript engine yielding three times faster Javascript performance.

Android is emerging as a major competitor to other mobile devices - iPhone, iPad, Blackberry etc. and in order to increase its usage/share in the business field, Android 2.2 features some enterprise improvements - better integration with Microsoft Exchange, account auto-discovery and calender autosync. Yet another thing important to people using Android in business is security and this release also introduces a new API for the application developers to incorporate some security features in their applications.

Some of the finest features included in this Froyo are the Connection sharing capabilities. You can now turn your Android device into a Wi-Fi Hotspot - USB tethering is also supported. And from now you won't have to worry about the small Internal memory because Froyo lets you install applications on an external SD card.

Another issue that users mostly don't like is manually updating applications and updating them individually is an additional headache. Froyo provides a user with the much-needed "Update All" button to update all the applications in a single Go. Users can even mark certain applications for automatic updates, something folks at Google really like.

There have been some improvements in the camera too. Now, you can record videos using LED flash, earlier available only to shoot still images. A new UI providing onscreen controls to manage zoom, flash, white balance, geo-tagging, focus and exposure.

One thing that you might have noticed in earlier releases was the lack of application bug tracking. Android 2.2 features a bug reporting system named Android Application Error Reports which will give developers access to freeze and crash reports from users.

Overall, users are going to love Android 2.2, aka Froyo. With their current versions Android is already giving its competitors a hard time, but with Froyo Android's popularity will no doubt reach new heights. You can find other platform highlights here.