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One Week on Froyo

Late March 2011 Motorola has finally begun to roll out Froyo for Milestone in Europe. Yesterday, it's been a week since I upgraded my Milestone from Eclair to Froyo, so here comes a list of first impressions:

The Good Stuff (Pros)
  • Move to SD is great stuff, I have been fighting with insufficient space on internal drive for most of the last six months.
  • New breed of Google Apps including Gmail with Priority Inbox and Calendar with enhanced sync for multiple Google accounts represents a big productivity boost for me.
  • Overall, many apps with Froyo-only features such as push-sync in RememberTheMilk or SHOUTcast radio support in WinAmp make the phone much more up-to-date.
  • The switching back and forth between Flight Mode and normal mode is reliable in Froyo (this has been huge annoyance in Eclair)
  • I have not experienced a single spontaneous restart during the past week.
  • The Flash support in the Browser also comes handy - no more websites with the annoying blue missing plug-in logo.
Not so Good Stuff (Cons)
  • Something is clearly broken in the Home screen applet - going back forces the whole screen to refresh, which is very slow and can take several seconds to complete. Probably as a result of this, the dedicated Home button sometimes does not seem to react at all. I usually press-and-hold the button to get straight to the list of the last 8 apps to switch quickly between the apps. I use the Home screen as last resort only.
  • The dedicated Search button is even worse - it seems that it registers clicks at about 50% of occasions. If I hold it a little bit longer, the Voice Search pops-up instead, which is pretty annoying.
  • The phone hangs for couple of seconds from time to time, but then resorts to normal operation. I suspect, there is some memory issue in Froyo, causing the operating system to keep closing and re-launching apps much more often than it used to be in Eclair
  • I disabled all window animations in Settings and disabled live wallpaper on the Home screen which somewhat improved the speed of re-draw but still has not solved the problem so far.
Summary

So far so good. I am glad Motorola has finally made it, because I am afraid that otherwise the Milestone would not last much longer - the amount of Froyo-only and Froyo-enhanced apps and the severe internal drive limitation were basically killing the device. The new release (Android 2.2.1) packaged together by Motorola is definitely usable even though it has its flaws.

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