Exclusive: Google Android 2.5 Froyo ROM And Upcoming Features Leaked!

Android Police

In the land of Android, things are really happening today.

Verizon continued to roll out Android 2.1, not without some smart folks figuring out how to skip the whole OTA business and install it without waiting in line.

A few confirmed reports of HTC Hero successful upgrades to 2.1 have surfaced as well, even though the latest rumored rollout date was thought to be April 9th.

But that was not the biggest news of the day.

Thanks to an anonymous tipster who works for Google, we now have a leaked document with planned Android 2.5, codenamed Froyo, features as well as the alpha version of the Froyo ROM.

Without further ado,

New Features Of Android 2.5 (Froyo)

Google OS Slimming

As promised, Froyo will start separating a lot of the applications currently embedded in the core and liberating them into the market as separate apps.

Portable App Engine

Using the new Portable App Engine, Android will now be able to run Palm Pre and iPhone applications using a virtual machine.

While the Pre only has about 2,000 applications, Apple's iPhone is currently the industry leader with 150,000+. iPhone's best games are very desirable to non-iPhone owners, for example, as they generally offer superior graphics and level of gameplay, that is, until Froyo comes out.

Portable App Engine is a "20%" project started by 2 Google engineers - Joseph Smarr and Ikai Lan - and got its name from Google's flagship App Engine.

Google is notorious for allowing their engineers to work 20% of their time (1 day a week) developing their own ideas and releasing the most ingenious ones to the public. For example, Gmail, Google News, Orkut, Google Talk, and Google Sky Map were all "20%" projects

New Charging Technology

The Froyo SDK will lay the groundwork for the new charging technology, similar to the recently announced RCA AirPower which should allow charging by absorbing power from surrounding WiFi signals. No word yet on what Google has planned yet.

Calendar Bug Fixes

The Android calendar is notorious for being a little cuckoo and alerting users of all-day events too early, as well as displaying conflicting information between the calendar and the widgets. Froyo promises to address calendar issues in order to make Android more attractive to business users.

We'll be updating this list in case more information comes in, so keep checking back. In the meantime follow us on twitter and subscribe to the RSS feed.

Download Froyo Alpha

The Froyo alpha ROM which includes the PDF of the features described above can be downloaded here. If you are planning on playing with the ROM, be warned - it's very early stage software and hacker skills will be required.