Android 2.1 Review

Well, its been several weeks now and I’m both impressed and disappointed with the Android upgrade.

Android 2.1The ability to dictate to any text field is impressive. I have used this in the car with the sunroof open and lots of white noise and it rarely misses. However, when it does miss the result is quite amusing.

Pinching is nice, but I had the map upgrade before the 2.1 upgrade and the addition to the browser is not much different, either.

Active wallpaper is nice and according to the phone barely using CPU cycles or power, respective to other apps and radio signals.

So why has it dramatically slowed down? Sometimes it seems very unresponsive. On the other hand, I haven’t had to reboot it. It slows, but is never completely unresponsive.  Many have already blogged about frame rate dropping after upgrading and there’s arguments whether that is OpenGL or the OS.  However, I’ve noticed more memory usage and much more battery usage.

All in all, the Motorola Droid is far superior to any phone I’ve ever owned and still does everything I expected it to.  The Android platform seems more phone to use than iPhone (we’ll see about OS 4, though).  I guess I was expecting more from an “upgrade.”