Android 2.2 – features wish list

Android 2.1 is great – we love it in the HTC Desire and HTC Legend – but there are many ways we can come up with to make the Android OS better. Here are the improvements we hope Google will make with Android 2.2

Got any more improvements you’d like to see? Let us know in the comments section.

Installing apps to SD

With Android 2.1, you’re left with only a few hundred megabytes of internal memory to install apps to as you can’t install to SD, which doesn’t leave you with enough when there are tens of thousands out there to check out. Let your internal memory get too low and you’ll start seeing more errors within apps too, so at present you have to be careful with your app downloading. Even the low-end iPhone has 8GB to play with, so this Android limitation seems silly to us.

Native divx/xvid support

Even budget Androids like the HTC Tattoo have screens big and bright enough to watch movies on comfortably, but you have to head on into the Android Market to find a media player that can hack the sort of videos you might download from the web. Plug the functionality into the standard media player and everyone’s happy. The divx players you can grab from the Android Market aren’t the most polished apps around, so a first-party solution would be a big bonus for Android.

Advanced home screen management

Some Androids have seven home screens, some five. Some have fancy transitions, some don’t. Why not let us choose how many home screens we want as standard? It could be an inoffensive option nestled within the settings menu, so that any Android newbies wouldn’t have to worry about it. Not everyone wants a phone cluttered with pages of icons, so the ability to cut them down – right down to one single home screen – would add something to the vanilla Android experience.

Multi touch

The HTC Desire bolted-on multi touch to Android, letting you use the handy pinch zoom move when browsing, but it’s not a standard feature within Android. Trying to implement it would probably cause problems when some hardware won’t support the feature, but there must be some way around this, right? Google’s done some amazing things in its time, and implementing multi touch shouldn’t be too taxing for Google’s best and brightest.

A better Android Market

The Android Market is packed with thousands of apps. Tens of thousands of apps. Actually finding anything good can be difficult though because the basic navigational tools at your disposal aren’t up to the task. Apps are split into sections and there’s a basic search tool but it’s more difficult than either the Apple App Store or the BlackBerry App World. Android is going to become increasingly popular as an OS in 2010, so it’s time its app store got a spruce up, don’t you think?