Android 2.2 ROMs on the Moto Droid [impressions]

Since Sunday, June 6, I have been been using Android 2.2 on my Motorola Droid, the first release was posted by MyDroidWorld Saturday night and many servers were too full to handle the demand. Another release was posted soon after with a few fixes (most notably was the fix for Chrome To Phone) and besides a few hangup everything was running smoothly. I was happy with the MDW release and knew that soon the ROM makers and themers would be using these releases to create and deploy.

Soon was an understatement, just 5 days after the first release Pete released Bugless Beast v0.1 Froyo ROM and blew the prior releases out of the water. I'm currently running Pete's ROM and the speed is just incredible. I'm overclocked to 1.0 GHz (the ROM overclocks to 800 MHz automatically) and with all of Pete's tweaks and patches this phone is probably the most responsive I've ever seen it.

I watched the announcement of Android 2.2 and was still surprised by some of the features. I was especially looking forward to the Chrome To Phone functionality and the updated Market; the surprise came when I opened GMail and saw the changes made there (mostly behind-the-scenes but still very much appreciated) like how quick it was to switch accounts, the addition of profile pictures in the emails, and how they kept the swapped the placement of the "Delete" and "Labels" buttons on the inbox view. Along with the GMail app the Talk app got a few tweaks, the most notable is that now your chats in GMail sync with Talk on your phone so you don't have to go back and forth to see what you typed in each if you switch.

Overall, the speed can't be matched (my Quadrant score was 1253 and in Linpack I scored 15.6 MFLOPS) for this phone, it's smooth and very responsive and I'm happy with the stock launcher even. If you would like to give it a try, you can head over to Android Forums and you can either get the Bugless Beast version or go for the original MyDroidWorld release. I would suggest getting the Bugless Beast as it is way faster than the MDW one. Also, there's a few updates you will have to run in the form of a patch to fix WiFi (only on the MDW release) and a Flash apk.