Android 2.2: What's New? (Part 2)

Let's take a look at some more new features in Android 2.2, including streaming iTunes audio, sharing 3G networks over WiFi and backing up your phone.

Anybody who's bought a new smartphone will know how much of a pain it is to have to reinstall all of your apps, set everything up just the way you like it and get all of your messages back.  Android 2.2 has an easy solution, allowing you to back up the whole contents of your phone.  You can save your apps, web favourites and history and everything else.  That will have plenty of time when you upgrade to a new handset.

Streaming music from your computer to your phone

This isn't a new feature as such, but it's now going to be directly integrated as a core feature of Android OS.  Once you've installed the right software on your computer (although there were no more details), you'll be able to access all of your music directly from your Android phone.  The demo used iTunes running on Mac OS.


At last: apps on the memory card!

Until now, you could only install apps on your phone's internal memory.  The hitch was that recent handsets haven't had more than 200 MB of memory built-in, but ship with memory cards that offer several gigabytes of storage.


This limitation has been removed in Android 2.2, which will allow you to install apps on your phone's internal memory (which is faster) or on a memory card (a little slower).  That's not a moment too soon for some.  And there's good news for developers who worried about making it too easy to copy apps: programs will only be stored on a reserved, encrypted area of the card.

Yet more voice control

Google also spent a lot of the presentation talking about voice recognition.  Several demos showed how you can use your phone without having to even touch the keyboard.  The demo showed a Google Image Search for 'photos of Barack Obama with the French president at the G8 summit' and the results appeared immediately.  Another example was calling a restaurant: if you ask your phone to 'call the Fifth Floor Restaurant', it will look up the number online and place the call for you.


Your phone as a WiFi access point

Using your phone as a makeshift modem for getting online using your computer is already possible, but until now, you had to really on a slow Bluetooth link or a USB cable.  You also needed to install the right drivers on your laptop, and, of course, configure the whole thing.

In Android 2.2, though, you can use your phone as a wireless access point.  This was demonstrated with an iPad, which joined a wireless network provided by the phone and connected to the Internet from there.  The advantage of this solution is that it requires no extra software of configuration.  You can even connect several computers to the same phone—up to eight for the time being.

At last (part two): automatic app updates

The official count of the number of apps available in Android Market is now around 50 000, and lots of them are updated regularly.  Every single one of these updates requires the user's intervention.  It's easy enough to go into the Market and check which of your installed apps need updating, but it could be easier.


Android 2.2 brings automatic updates.  You can turn automatic updating on and off for any app you like.  'Finally' you might say, and you're not the only one: the announcement of this feature received loud applause at the press conference.  'I'm kind of embarrassed that you have to clap on that' admitted Vic Gundotra.  It seems such an obvious feature that we wonder why it wasn't included from the beginning.

Android 2.2 on the Nexus One in the next few weeks ... and then what?

So the big question is: will your phone get Android 2.2?   If you have Google's own phone, the Nexus One, then it will be available in a few weeks.  We suspect it will be rolled out relatively quickly as all of these demos were performed on Nexus One handsets which seemed to be working perfectly.


For everybody else—don't forget, there are over fifty Android phones now—it will depend on your manufacturer's decision.  For the time being, only HTC has made an announcement: all of the phones it has released since the start of this year will be upgraded to Android 2.2.  That includes the HTC Desire, HTC Legend and HTC Wildfire.  The update will be available in the second half of the year, but there are no more details than that.

You can catch the whole Android 2.2 on YouTube, and read the first part of our look at what's new in the next version of Google's OS.


> Buyer's Guides: Our Pick of The Best Products