Top 7 New Features of Android 2.2

So you know by now that Android 2.2 — FroYo — is much faster than 2.1 and supports Flash 10.1, but that’s not the whole story. We dove into its new mobile hotspot feature, but there are several more additions to Android worthy of note.

1. The phone and browser apps now have dedicated shortcuts that flank the app launcher. Now you can access them from any of the Home screens (and free up space for other oft-used apps).
2. Customers who want to use their Android phones for work will now face much less frustration due to 2.2′s Exchange support. Auto-discovery makes it easy to set up and sync an Exchange email account, and the Calendar app now supports Exchange as well. Plus, there are improved security features for users and admins.
3. Camera controls are no longer hidden under a pull-down menu. Buttons for zoom, flash, white balance, geo-tagging, focus and exposure are right on-screen (but transparent).
4. Users will now be able to share contacts with other phones over Bluetooth.

5. For those so addicted to apps that internal storage just isn’t enough, Android developer APIs now allow apps to give users the choice of where to install them: phone memory or an SD card.
6. Another developer API makes it possible for apps to “participate in data backup and restore” so users who want to switch Android phones or restore after a hard reset can keep their data and apps.
7. Hopefully broken or misbehaving apps will improve faster as now developers can get app error reports from users whenever they log in to their publisher account.

The full list of Android 2.2 goodies is here on the developer’s website. Which one do you think is the best improvement over previous Android versions?