Android 2.1 generaly faster.

[Guest Chris Jenx]

I know this has been mentioned that 2.1 is meant to be faster generally. To be honest I can believe that, as when I was testing the 2.1 beta ROMs for the Hero they did feel allot quicker at opening app's and generally responding which is impressive considering they were very rough round the edges and still unoptimised.

I have been playing with the setCPU app (which has been updated for the N1) and playing with speed to see how it differs. So I clocked it down to the lowest speed which is about 245Mhz which is about 24% of the max clock speed. There I was expecting it to, not grind to a halt, but be no where near as snappy as it was. I was impressively proven wrong, even on the lowest clock the phone is still very usable... only issues being the app's them selfs (Spotify is a cpu nightmare, defiantly needs improvement).

I haven't been using it long enough to see how much the battery life is affected at different speeds, I'll try running my phone at a lower Clock speed during the day and report my findings.

People that know more about the Android system than I do could probably give a better analysis.

But I believe this could be a few reasons, the larger amounts of ram allow the GPU to put less strain on the CPU, there is a new graphics stack in 2.1 (correct me if I'm wrong).

I do have a few questions though:

• Is it just Android 2.1 here being that much more optimised and improved graphics library?
  
• Or is it that the Snap Dragon works differently to the other Qualcomm processors so they are generally better. (better instruction set etc..)?
  
• Or that the other hardware components in the Nexus One just take the extra strain off the processor allowing it to do just what I needs to do.
  

Cheers,

Chris