My Favorite Features in Froyo | Hacker News Reader

My Favorite Features in Froyo

smarterware.org

29 pointsyanw14 comments

The issue I have is that we've yet to see whether the tethering/WiFi hotspot features will actually be allowed by the carriers (for free). Sprint has already announced plans that WiFi hotspot service will be $30/mo with their Android 2.1 EVO. It is unreasonable to believe that Sprint is going to let Android 2.2 devices tether for free and charge $30/mo for older devices. In the end, this feature will likely end up similar to iPhone tethering. If you're willing to "jailbrake" the phone, it's there. Of course, it's likely that carriers will be able to detect tethering (it really shouldn't be too hard) and call up the user to tell them that they have to stop or a $XX charge will be added to their account monthly for tethering usage. They might even add the charge without alerting the user - how many people who don't have a data plan get charged without being alerted when they accidentally hit the web button on their phone? I don't think it's wholly unreasonable to believe that carriers might do the same for tethering.

As much as we'd all like to think that Google's in the driver's seat fighting for users rights when Apple won't stand up for them, it's still the networks who are the gatekeepers. Froyo has the technological capability to do tethering/hotspot service. It's a great capability to add and it's great that Google has done so. That doesn't mean it's going to be free.

If you listen to the carriers tethering is a magical new feature that they have to spend lots of resources adding support for, when in reality it's a capability inherent to the architecture of the Internet until they deliberately block it. Building tethering into Android puts a spotlight on this idiocy and will hopefully end it, the same way that pushing updates quickly to the Nexus One has motivated some carriers to actually support their existing customers.

I've been occasionally tethering on Sprint (with PDANet) for almost 3 years and haven't been "caught" yet. I try to VPN so it isn't completely trivial to see that my traffic is from a tethered laptop. But I'd be ok paying $30/month for tethering if I had to. I just wasn't ok with $60/month.

That you haven't been caught yet doesn't imply that they won't start trying in the future.

With the vast uptake in smartphones and those smartphones now coming equipped with tethering, carriers just might find it's worthwhile to crack down.

It appears Vodafone in the UK will allow it up to their fair use policy, which appears to be 500MB a month. They'll notify you by text if you hit this limit, and you can of course pay more if you expect to use more than that.

They also state that the Nexus One updates come straight from Google, as do the HTC Android/Sense come direct from HTC.

I'd be interested to know how they're going to stop it, for people who've gotten their own phones.

Rogers in Canada offers tethering for free :D

Oddly enough, the best feature in Froyo for me has been the ability to update all applications with only a single button press, rather than having to go through each one individually. Being able to elect to have some applications auto-update is just gravy on top.

It used to be I'd have to spend on average 2 minutes every day just updating applications.

Just curious, how many apps do you have installed? I spend maybe 5 minutes every other week doing the updates.

70 at the moment.

Isn't this also one of their big anti-fragmentation things, by updating the apps directly via the marketplace rather than bundling them with Android updates?

Didn't know that Flash had an "On-demand" feature. I think it's time to accidentally drop my Blackberry in the toilet.

I've found it more reliable to turn off the plugin service, as I had a couple of flash blobs sneak through on-demand.

The Gallery app is now tied in to Picasa: previously, I could only see my local picture files. Now it shows me my Picasa albums and pictures.

The down-side is that I first discovered this on an iffy Edge connection and it struggled to download the thumbnail pictures for the albums. Once I got home (wifi), it popped up the albums, thumbnails, and pictures nicely.

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