I wanted to deploy my app to my HTC Desire to see what it looks like on a phone but it wasn't quite as straight forward as I had hoped.

When reading the Android documentation it says that you have to turn on USB debugging by "go to the home screen, press MENU, select Applications > Development, then enable USB debugging".

Now I don't know if it's the Sense UI, me running it localized in swedish or that I'm running Froyo - but the above description proved hard to follow.

The way to do it for me was to open the apps tab, select Settings (Inställningar) then go to Programs (Program) > Development (Utveckling) then select USB debugging (USB-felsökning).

Then changing the current Run configuration and setting the Deploy Target Selection Mode to Manual did the trick. And as I feared my buttons wouldn't work at all, I have to say my black tinted buttons not only worked, but came out even better than I had expected.

LG Promised to shake things up with their upcoming Android devices. A leak regarding their prototype Star makes me want to believe them.

The upcoming Star is apparently based on NVidia’s Tegra 2 chipset, meaning it will run on dual core’s.

And it sports some otherwise nice hardware specs as well, a 8MP camera and promising 1080p video recording. It also has a front facing camera, a 4 inch screen, micro USB and a 1500mAh battery.

The person responsible for the leak ran Quadrant(free benchmarking tool available on Android market) on the device, it produced a score of 1759. In perspective my HTC Desire scores 1289(higher than the reference Desire shown in the Quadrant comparison view, most likely due to me running Froyo).

The LG Star is told to be destined for a early 2011 release, and the leaked device was running Froyo. Hopefully it will be upgraded to Gingerbread if it releases in 2011.

Just to bad this beast couldn’t be released for the holidays 2010 instead!

Yesterday I finally got my HTC Desire, I've been waiting for it for about 9 weeks now.

I've been playing around with it a bit and I must say it's a really nice piece of hardware. The only thing that's annoying me so far is the small top status bar where you click and drag down to see incoming updates about messages, calls, installed applications and so on. It seems the bar isn't really the same size as my fingers and I have a hard time "gripping" it. (And I who got such thin sleek coder fingers!)
When playing around with the device I found an option for tethering and got a bit surprised. After checking the info tab my suspicion turned out to be true. It was actually shipped to me with Froyo already installed! Sweet.

I was thinking that I would have to update it when I got it, but it seems this batch was already updated before shipped.

Chippy released some more info about the Aava Moorestown based handset today.

The MeeGo version on it is really early in development stage at the moment so a lot of stuff is lacking.

He did run a SunSpider(a performance test for Javascript) test though. The Aava handset got a result of about 4.2 seconds with the Firefox build that was installed. Probably it would shave off a second or two if it had a newer build of the Firefox browser, or another faster browser like Chrome.

It's pretty decent figures, about what some netbooks does. The Nexus One with Froyo installed completes the test in about 5.7-6 seconds(depending on device and Froyo build).

There's no denying that the Moorestown platform packs some punch, but it will be interesting to see what the latest dual core Qualcomm processor will do, as there is no doubt it will shave quite a bit of the Nexus One's times.

Chippy also posted a longer video on YouTube for your enjoyment.

Rumors of Google releasing version 3.0 of Android as early as this fall is surfacing all over the net. The largest focus is said to be on the user interface, and there is talk of Google making a lot of choices that Microsoft has been doing with Windows Phone 7.

The Gingerbread build is said to be requiring a certain spec from the phones it's going to be installed on, for instance a 1GHz processor seems to be one of those requirements.

There will most likely be a minimum spec for the screen as well, to help developers a bit and not force them to cater to every screen resolution released so far. Just like Microsoft is setting minimum specs.

It's also rumored that Google want to avoid the UI fragmentation going on in the Android scene where almost every manufacturer are delivering their own custom made UI. The way to do this is by focusing on providing a better stock UI, and then prevent device manufacturers from releasing phones with customized UI's. This is the way Microsoft is handling Windows Phone 7 as well.

This is of course something that will help regarding the time to market for the newer Android builds. Because as it is now, all manufacturers have to tweak all their added software and home cooked UI's after Google releases a new version of Android, which leads to longer time to market.

Rumor has it Gingerbread will be available as soon as October. The existing Froyo build is said to still be available, but kept as an OS for the lower spec range of phones.

Over the past week there have been several Froyo (Android 2.2) releases for the Nexus One being written about on the net. Now it seems the real deal is out finally.

This release is named FRF85 and it seems some Nexus One owners running on AT&T are receiving the update OTA today.

If you are on any other carrier and still want to install Froyo on your Android device, you can go to this Google link and download the latest build from there.

The official blog post regarding this Froyo release from Google can be seen here.

Are you feeling an urge for better Exchange support, better camera and gallery handling, ability to create portable hotspots, maybe keyboard support for multiple languages or just some plain old increased performance?

If so you might just have the urge for some Froyo!

And now Google are handing out Froyo, at least to us developers. You can access it at the Android Developers page. For an overview of the highlights in the new Android 2.2, check this page out.

The Droid X was announced today to be provided by Verizon for $199 on a 2-year plan and will be available on July 15:th.

The specs looks pretty much as what was believed from the leaks before, the full list of impressive specs reads:

• 4.3″, 854×480 screen in 16:9 format
• HDMI out and DLNA support
• 1GHz TI OMAP processor
• Flash 10.1 support coming with Froyo
• 8 gigs on board and a 16gig card included, but compatible with 32gig SD cards for a total potential memory of 40 gigs
• 512mb RAM
• 8 MP camera that captures 720p HD video
• Three microphones (outward-facing for video, noise-canceling, and regular)
• 1570mAh battery
• aGPS
• Bluetooth
• WiFi
• WiFi Hotspot with support for tethering up to 5 devices will also be available for an additional $20 per month with a 2 gig cap.

Verizon stated that Droid X users will get access to Froyo(Android 2.2) later this summer, and this will also bring full Flash 10.1 support.

On paper the Droid X looks like a very strong candidate for the top spot as king of Androids. The current competition being HTC's EVO 4G and Google's Nexus One. It will be fun to see a couple of reviews when the unit becomes more available to see what it handles like.

In the mean time, AndroidCentral have made a very nice comparison sheet over the iPhone 4, HTC’s Droid Incredible, HTC's Evo 4G and Google's Nexus One. Check it out below.

For all those out there waiting for Android 2.2(Froyo) it seems it's now officially available on Google's servers for the Nexus One.


To install build FRF72 you need to be running FRF50. You can get the FRF72 build from Google's servers here.

For all the Droid users awaiting an Android update to run Froyo, it's now available in sorts.

The guys over at My Droid World have released a community edition Froyo upgrade. Most of the functionality is in place they say, although you will loose Wifi support at this moment.
So if you want to install Android 2.2 on your Droid, and can't wait for Motorola to make an official release, you can get your hands on the download here.

Froyo vs Eclair

One of the larger improvements in Android 2.2 (Froyo) compared to the previous Android version 2.1 (Eclair) is the improvements of the JIT compiler. Google is stating that the performance would be increased by two to five times compared to the old JIT compiler. But is there any claim to the figures?

The guys over at AndroidCentral did a comparison between a Nexus One running Froyo, a HTC Evo 4G and a Motorola Droid, both the later running Eclair. The results look good for Froyo, and Google's claims seems to hold true.

Check the vid below for the score card of the performance tests.


As well as Sunspider performance - the 3D performance seems to have improved by about 15%-20% as well with the jump from Eclair to Froyo.

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More articles about Froyo on mobilemancer!
More articles about Eclair on mobilemancer!

Dell has announced that the Streak Android device will be available in June. The Streak is sporting a 5" 480*800 screen, so it will be larger than all smartphones available. More than that the spec sheet reads:

• 1GHz Snapdragon Processor
• 16GB Internal memory
• Expandable SD card slot with up to 32GB more memory
• 5MP Camera
• Low res front side camera for video chat
• 3G support
• Wifi support
• Bluetooth 2.1 support

It will be shipping with Android 1.6 (Donut) installed, but will be upgradeable to Froyo (Android 2.2) at a later date.

Personally I am a bit skeptic to the form factor. Since I suspect most people would replace their phone/smartphone with this, isn't the size a bit too large? They have built in a mic and speaker so you can put it too your ear and talk into it like a phone, but it looks kind of silly. Now of course most people use a headset anyways. But I still have my doubts for the size, even though browsing the web and looking at video content probably will be a lot more comfortable for the eyes and hopefully not give pinch-to-zoom syndrome fingers.

See the vid below for a nice demo of the Streak from Delll:

Google claimed that the browser in Froyo is the fastest smartphone browser available. This has to be tested of course! In the vid below it's visible that it is indeed fast, maybe faster than the iPhone and the Opera browser running on an HTC HD2. But that the Flash 10.1 beta is not yet to be recommended.

Let's hope the final Flash implementation will be much improved, cause if it ruins the browsing experience like it does in the vid, it's really of no use.



Maybe the Steve wasn't far off claiming Flash would ruin the performance of the browser and hence refuse to support it on iPhone...

During the week at Google I/O a lot of news were released about the next version of Android, named Froyo.

Some of the new features are in Froyo are:

• Automatic application updates
• Possibility to install apps to an SD card
• JIT compiler upgrades, promising 2x-5x speed boost
• Java-script engine updates, enhancing performance by 2x-3x times
• Tethering and portable hot spot capability
• Adobe Flash and Air support
• API for Cloud-To-Device push notifications
• App data backup API
• Application crash report details presented to developers on their Android market publisher account

Android 2.2 Official Video