Skip to main content

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.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Coasting Like a PRO

Roughly three months into driving 225xe, it seems about right time come back to revisit the initial impressions and see how the car fares in long-term usage. In this post, I want to focus on the 225xe driving modes of which the car offers aplenty. First, there are the three traditional BMW Driving Experience modes: COMFORT, SPORT, and ECO PRO, which come fitted on non-hybrid powertrains as well. Then there are the eDrive modes: AUTO eDrive, MAX eDrive, and SAVE BATTERY. To complicate this even further, moving the gear stick to the left at any time switches the automatic gearbox to the sports mode, so there are two gearbox modes: Drive and Sport/Manual which allows sequential gear shifts. So in theory, there are 3 x 3 x 2 = 18 combinations, in practice, some of the combinations are mutually exclusive, so it is not so extreme as it seems. What is apparent though is that BMW keeps adding new options while maintaining the legacy options as well without thinking about consolidation. This...
Post a Comment
Read more

Version 2.0 Syndrome - Why the Software Architecture Matters

"Guys you will never have a chance to build the version 2.0, you have to get it right from the get-go, or keep suffering from your mistakes for the lifetime of the product." - Jiri Karpeta, my boss at LCS International, used to say. It was back in 1995, and while LCS's bread and butter were Helios, an ERP for the SMB segment, we were busy building Noris - the future LCS's flagship ERP for larger enterprises. Of course, given the above philosophy, LCS was quite heavily invested in CASE tools to support our software design efforts. That's where I learned the first time that software modeling matters. But back to the original statement above that you "never get a chance to build the version 2.0" . It may sound too harsh, too fatalistic. Well, you may be right, there are always exceptions to the rule. While I don't have exact statistics at hand, my experience shows that the statement is more often correct than not. I have interviewed hundreds of softw...
Post a Comment
Read more

First Month of Active Touring

Putting my money where my mouth is, I took on the adventure of buying a plug-in hybrid. A few years back, I used to drive a car only for weekend getaways, so an SUV seemed to be a logical choice. At only fifteen thousand kilometers driven annually, the fuel economy was not a significant issue, the driving experience was the main thing. During the past few years with family and small kids, the car usage became more spread out throughout the week. With that said, I noticed we maintain two very distinct driving patterns: many short trips around Prague during the week to get kids to school and sports and then longer trips, roughly 100 miles each direction, during the weekends. With short distances and many cold starts due to the city driving on the workdays, the already poor fuel economy of an SUV deteriorated further. I realized when our car was up for renewal that it was almost as if we needed two different vehicles for two different use cases - an electric vehicle for city driving a...
Post a Comment
Read more