Features Announced At Google IO

• Just-in-Time compiler confirmed
• Microsoft Exchange integration including auto-discovery and remote wipe
• New services just as data backup APIs for carriers to move your data from one device to another
• Tethering announced for Wifi and USB, shown in demo, pokes fun at iPad; no word on whether carriers can disable it
• 2x-3x performance boost in the Browser, new Javascript engine is SO much faster
• Optimizations for using the camera, orientation (accelerometers) within the browser
• Speech control and recognition is so much smoother, including Mandarin and Japanese, including speech recognition to make phone calls
• Real-time language translation
• Announced support for Flash Player 10.1 Public Beta and AIR developer pre-release, showed Flash working on Nickelodeon
• New ways to work with apps:
  • Finding new apps (app search)
  • Searching data within apps (showed Mint.com app search)
  • Installing to SD memory with a “Move to SD card” button within the Application Info screen, demoed Need for Speed game
  • Update All and Auto-Update confirmed
  • Bug reporting, can view stack trace online
• Sneak peak of new Android Marketplace, because demo user is logged in, you can view your installed apps and over-the-air app sync
• New Marketplace feature: over-the-air music sync
• Sync your Android device with your iTunes library to live-stream your music to your device

TechCrunch reports that Android 2.2 (Froyo) will support USB and Wifi tethering, though it remains to be seen whether carriers will have an option to disable this feature. TechCrunch leaked some information about availability of tethering within Froyo, and dozens of other sites picked it up, not to mention countless tweets about it. It made some serious headlines, and has had a lot of feedback from users hoping to get a 2.2 upgrade to their Android device when they haven’t even had a 2.1 upgrade yet. All I can say to them is good luck.

What is T-Mobile’s Position, Though?

Shortly after getting my own Nexus One in February, our office Internet connection went down, I had the opportunity to try some of the thirt-party tethering apps in the Android Market, such as PDANet and EasyTether. Having successfully installed PDANet, plugging in my Nexus One via USB and getting the client running on my MacBook, and sharing my MacBook’s new Internet connection with my coworkers, I sent a quick tweet about my successful trial:

Three minutes later, T-Mobile sent a reply tweet:

Early Morning Tethering

Early on a Friday morning mid-March, I awoke to find our home WiFi on the blink. This time, I used EasyTether with my M17x running Windows 7 Ultimate, and sent another tweet about being able to get online:

Within 5 minutes, another reply from T-Mobile:

And, Now That Froyo is Announced …?

After reading the TechCrunch article, and several others about Sprint wanting to charge extra for the EVO “experience”, I decided to ping T-Mobile again about tethering, but this time asking whether they’ll charge us extra for it:

This time, T-Mobile took almost two hours to reply:

What’s the Verdict?

I guess we’ll have to wait for the Froyo announcement from Google, and then a follow-up announcement from T-Mobile, as to whether they’ll let the Nexus One have an untouched 2.2 build, or whether T-Mobile will tweak the software to disable USB/WiFi tethering and/or charge its users more per month. It’s already been announced that T-Mobile will slow down our cell network bandwidth once we’ve transferred 5GB/month, but so far they’ve been very cool about allowing tethering on their network — via third-party apps that users are unlikely to run for extended periods of time. AT&T has allowed tethering on certain devices if you pay a premium monthly data plan price ($60/month), Verizon charges extra for USB tethering, and WiFi tethering on their Palm Pre Plus devices, and Sprint has announced they will charge extra for the EVO’s data plan which, coincidentally, allows tethering — is that Sprint’s way of charging for WiFi tethering?

If I were King for a day

If I were T-Mobile, I’d leave tethering alone on Froyo, let the users have access to it, continue to slow our bandwidth after 5GB, and use that as a serious advantage against the other 3 major carriers. It would bring in lots of additional customers, especially road warriors, and would most definitely increase their brand popularity.

Rumor has it of course that the Nexus One will get the first roll-out of Froyo, so it remains to be seen how T-Mobile will handle themselves with this new OS build. Personally, I can’t wait to see what’s in store for the Nexus One when Froyo is announced.

Over lunch today, I did some benchmarking with Linpack on my own Nexus One, using a stock Android 2.1 build, and the Nexus One provided by Adobe. It was astonishing to see the difference in MFLOPS (Millions of FLOating-Point operations per Second), essentially a high-precision mathematics sequencing instruction set that tests how quickly a CPU can run a known number of calculations. Since Linpack themselves publish a benchmark Top 10 for Android devices, I’m not disclosing anything that hasn’t already been publicly confirmed by others.

Dare to Compare

The stock Nexus One with Android 2.1 averages in the high 6.9 to low 7.0 range for MFLOPS, but the Nexus One running the Debug release of Android 2.2 (aka FroYo, “frozen yogurt”) can apparently achieve a score of up to 40 MFLOPS. My own testing confirms it at a high-36 to mid-37 range:

How it’s Done

Google has already confirmed that a new JIT (just-in-time) Java compiler will be in Android 2.2, but I don’t pretend to know how the Java virtual machine works or how JIT would improve it. Rumor has it that Android 2.2 will be announced at Google IO next week, so hang tight!

Update, May 12 10am PST

As specified above, I don’t know whether this is JIT in action. I can’t confirm or deny that JIT is part of the Froyo release. The Nexus One provided to my employer has a developer release of Froyo on it, but I’m not allowed to disclose the features of the OS — but if this stuff makes it into the official release WHOA BABY.

Update, May 20, 9am PST

Google announced at Google IO that Froyo does indeed have the new Just-In-Time compiler.