Mobile phone software experts Myriad take a shot at making Android faster, better and last longer

Myriad is a very interesting company – it’s an amalgamation of a tonne of different companies that have had a hand in mobile technology over the years. In fact, there are so many different companies combined under the Myriad name that it has software running on over 2 billion handsets. To use a very Irish phrase: “it’s only bleedin’ massive!”. It is also one of the founding members of the Open Handset Alliance, and has had a huge hand in the development of the Android operating system. And today, it is announcing an upgrade to one of the central elements of Android – the software that its applications run on.

What’s this now?

There is a piece of software on Android phones called Dalvik. It’s a virtual machine that runs Java code on Android devices (and it was quite controversial when it was first announced back in 2007). Since Android apps are largely Java based, this is an extremely piece of software. It’s the framework from which Android runs its applications – currently the most important aspect of any smartphone.

Myriad has announced that it is released a new version of this virtual machine called Dalvik Turbo, which will massively improve the speed and performance of Android apps. In fact, Myriad is claiming that installing Dalvik Turbo on your Android will allow 3x faster apps, better graphics for games, and an improvement in the battery life of the device.

And all without needing to update anything except Dalvik – you can keep your original device and nothing else needs to be upgraded.

What we think?

This looks interesting – but seeing as I’m not a software engineer, I’m really not qualified to judge it. One thing does strike me though… part of the point of this release is that with little or no effort on the half of a device owner, you can boost the performance of your Android device significantly.

Ok, so far so awesome.

But it goes on to state “Myriad engineers [demonstrated] installation on an untested target device within minutes.” Wait, what? It took a team of Myriads very own engineers MINUTES to install it on a device. What happened to those awesome OTA updates that Android is so good at? Shouldn’t this be an automagic process?