Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Android Reloaded



On Monday night I got home from the pub, and my phone announced that there was an update available, and would I be so kind as to allow it to update itself. I said, 'Yes, that would be lovely', and my G1 proceeded to show me a nice updating screen while it changed all its software around.

There's not much to see for it. The Android Market now tells you when anything you've installed has an update available, which is nice. Google Maps is now version 3, but I can't tell the difference. The biggest changes though, have to be memory usage and power consumption. Previously, after using my phone on and off during the day at work, the battery level would generally be down around 40% when I came home. However, the last two days have seen it around 60% instead, which is a great improvement. The other change is that before the update, my /data partition had around 10Mb free on it, while after the update it has around 30Mb free. I don't know how they've done that. Perhaps shifted some space from the /cache partition? I never bothered noting the free space on anything other than /data before.

6 comments:

arnonym said...

Don't you realize? Behind the scenes google techs found a way to update your battery via internet. (Probably just by a firmware change of the lifetime calculation:)

yokem55 said...

(Probably just by a firmware change of the lifetime calculation:)
Or it could be that the application stack is getting more efficient with its power usage (i.e. less cpu wakeups, more aggressive hardware power management, etc.)

Scott Webster said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Scott Webster said...

The Google Maps update now adds Latitude! Location sharing and awareness using GPS or triangulated cell phone towers.

Scott Webster,AndroidGuys

James Ots said...

Nope, no Google Latitude in RC9 - the UK update. (Not that I'd want it anyway).

localhorst said...

Yes, the update is much better regarding battery life time ...

Before the update i even had days where the battery was empty before the end of the day.

But don't use it without a flatrate ... i had a 634 Euro bill the first month, but my provider offered my a great deal, so i didn't pay for it :-)