I just hate to see people ensnared by the old pc logic that a new os will always place a higher demand on system resources.
This is a very, very important point for people to take to heart. This isn't Windows, where every release is a bigger porker than the previous one.
Story: In 1994, I ran Linux (the same kernel that underpins Android) for the first time on a 66 MHz i486 with 16MB of RAM. That machine was my desktop, a web server, a firewall and a few other things until I could no longer conveniently get a distribution that would boot on a 486. (I think that may have been as late as 2002.) During the entire time, as people spent time working on the kernel (and some userland things like the C compiler and libraries), I could do more with the same machine because the OS got better.
Android -- the entire package -- is going to go through the same thing, and it will take time. The kernel has had pretty close to 20 years of tuning on Intel-based PCs, and as more people have a reason to tune the ARM-specific code, it will improve. There's probably a lot of room to improve the upper layers of the stack, too. Enabling JIT in Dalvik is going to free up a lot of CPU cycles.
CPUs in the 500 MHz bracket are going to be around for awhile. They don't score a lot of nerd points with the crowd here, but they're plentiful and inexpensive enough to enable putting a lot more Android in a lot more hands globally. And this, folks, is something you
really want to happen.
2.1 made my eris run faster, and they say 2.2 is even faster still. Why wouldn't I believe them?
You're hallucinating. The Eris can't run 2.1, remember?
Come to think of it, I must be hallucinating, too.
--Mark
