Froyo 2.2 release for Nexus One comes from official Android site

Rating: Wasn’t this supposed to be a leak?

Curiouser and curiouser. Another release of the Android 2.2 (Froyo) OS has escaped into the wild. To all intents and purposes, this is supposed to be a ‘hack’ which has been ‘leaked’ to the fan site, Phandroid. Yet the file for Nexus One owners downloads directly from the Android site itself. Surely that makes it official?

The file in question is called ‘ signed-passion-FRF72-from-FRF50.bc033f9e.zip’. As the name suggests, you can use it to upgrade a Nexus One handset already running the FRF50 release and take it up to the very latest FRF72 release.

The important point is that the link to that file has a URL of  ‘android.clients.google.com’. Here’s the link. Bizarrely our Firefox browser did its best to prevent access to this file.

It’s hard to determine whether this upgrade only works with the Nexus One but don’t get your hopes up.

Given that GoMo News is fully expecting a Motorola 2.2 handset to appear in two days time (see here), it would seem logical to suppose that FRF72 is the final working version of Froyo. Especially since the software is actually ‘signed’ using the Android SignApk.

The thing which we all want to know is whether 2.2 really does unleash extra speed from the handset? Well, the answer would seem to be a resounding, Yes.

One Phandroid reader commented, “Works extremely well! Incredible speed. Update improves 3G speed. No stability problems. I highly recommend updating.”

So that would defintiley seem to point towards extra speed. The interesting thing is that this release also appears to improve 3G signal reception. That’s useful. Plus it somehow frees up an additional 50 Mb of storage space.

Of course, if you want to install this release on your Nexus One handset you’ll have to follow the instructions kindly provided on Phandroid site here.

Also thanks to Product Reviews for alerting us to this new release here.