Sprint Announces Froyo for the EVO

When Google announced Android Froyo v2.2 at I/O 2010, the new fea­tures had the audi­ence erupt­ing in cheers. But that wasn’t all, Google had another sur­prise: the com­pany choose to give every attendee a HTC EVO 4G  smart­phone with a month of Sprint ser­vice. However, there was unfor­tu­nately one quirk. Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering at Google, care­fully noted that those units wouldn’t ship with the new OS until “later in the year.” Since then, the Android com­mu­nity has fran­ti­cally been beg­ging, plead­ing, and wait­ing for a device run­ning Android 2.2. Developers, hack­ers, and geeks have man­aged to install cus­tom Froyo v2.2 ROMs onto cer­tain Android devices, but an offi­cial release of the new ver­sion has been hard to come around. Until now, the only device that offi­cially sup­ports Android v2.2 is the now-discontinued Google Nexus One.

Fortunately, that’s all about to change start­ing next week. HTC EVO 4G own­ers will begin receiv­ing the Android Froyo v2.2 update over-the-air. Initial reports indi­cated that an update wouldn’t become avail­able until the end of the year since it was tak­ing HTC a long time to rebuild Sense UI, but Sprint has put those rumors to rest with an offi­cial press release. Beginning on August 3rd, noti­fi­ca­tions for the update will appear on waves of devices. For those that choose to opt-in early by check­ing for updates in the set­tings menu, the new ver­sion will be avail­able as early as August 1st.

For those won­der­ing about the changes, Sprint’s press release lists the following:

• Voice Dialing Over Bluetooth.
• Application Storage on External Memory
• Camera 4-way rota­tion, cam­era icons rotate too
• Improved Browser Performance
  • Faster JavaScript engine
  • Flash 10x Support (beta)

While those are a few notable fea­tures, it’s not every­thing that Froyo v2.2 will bring. According to a Google rep­re­sen­ta­tive, the new ver­sion will improve bat­tery life, mul­ti­task­ing, and per­for­mance. HTC is even bundling in a set of new wid­gets includ­ing a flash light app. Unfortunately, we won’t know the full extent of the spe­cific changes until a devel­oper change-log becomes avail­able, but that’s bound to hit the web any­time. Sprint’s game-changing EVO 4G is once again news as it’s beat­ing com­peti­tors to the mar­ket. While Motorola’s CEO claimed the Droid X would get a Froyo v2.2 update “later this sum­mer,” HTC has now clearly beat them to it.

[via Skatter Tech » android]