Back in the 1960s and early 70s, the ne plus ultra of automotive performance was the big block V8. The Big 3 US automakers all had one, Chevy, Chrysler and Ford. Legends were made and tires destroyed by the likes of the Dodge 440 Hemi, the 454 Chevy and the Ford 427. With skinny tires, hard rubber and primitive suspensions, all but the fiercest of the big blocks had trouble breaking the 14 second barrier when running the quarter mile, meaning that even a fairly stout muscle car would have been about as fast as something like a Mazdaspeed3 or a Subaru WRX.

In 1965 Carol Shelby made history, taking a tiny little British sports car, much like an MG, and dropping in one of Ford's stoutest big blocks, the 427. And thus the Shelby 427 Cobra was born. Faster than anything else on the road at the time, running 12 second quarters the 427 Cobra was and is a beast and is to this day one of the most prized collector cars. Sometimes you can see the local Cobra club gather on Sunday mornings in Saratoga, at the base of one of the better driving roads in the area, just a few miles from the office here.

A similar heart transplant is getting ready to happen to a whole bunch of Android (News - Alert) devices when they get the equivalent of a big block transplant with the injection of some Froyo Android 2.2 goodness. The transformation is said to be rather noticeable, perhaps akin to swapping a ride in a sailboat for being shot out of a cannon.

Android is (more or less) Java-based, with older (2.1 and back) versions pretty much being interpreters, much like early home computers running BASIC. With 2.2 Froyo comes Just In Time compilation, which should give a performance boost of somewhere between 2-4.5x, which is about the same as the increase in performance you would see yanking the wheezing old 2.0 liter six and replacing it with a fire breathing big-block, which is exactly the transformation that changed a mediocre and relatively unknown sportcar into the legendary Cobra.

I carry a Nexus and we have had a bunch of Incredibles in the office and unlike the gasping old AC Ace these are not slow devices. For a while the smartphone industry was held back by a real lack of horsepower, a sad rut that the coming of the mighty Qualcomm (News - Alert) Snapdragon has pulled us out of. Combined, the Snapdragon with Froyo should be mighty tasty indeed.

Froyo has some other interesting implications. One of which was that in the past Android on lower spec hardware was , er, uh, less than snappy. However, should the promise of Froyo bear even some of the fruit that Google (News - Alert) claims that it will, then even relatively humble, cheap and cheerful hardware will start to sing when running 2.2. This means that mid-range and high end feature phones are going to be under increasing pressure as even cheap and cheerful Android devices start to deliver a compelling user experience.

To mangle the analogy a bit, while the old Cobra went well in a straight line, stopping and turning were not necessarily strong points. Froyo devices, in contrast, are far from one trick ponies. Some of the cool new tricks those devices will be picking up include better Exchange support including calendar, the ability to use the GAL (both long lamented holes) and remote wipe.

Like the Mifi? Great, now your phone can be a portable hotspot, supporting up to eight devices instead of just the five that the Mifi does.

It isn't just the Dalvik VM that gets faster, the browser is faster, particularly with lots of javascript, and memory management is better, which should help performance, particularly on humble hardware.

Anyway, long and short of it is that there is a lot of tasty new goodness in Froyo and that once word gets out there are going to be many end-users who are going to want to be able to upgrade to the latest and greatest. Of course, there are a couple ways in which that can happen, one being via the wire, which often requires a bit of clue and having the right hardware/os on a desktop/laptop computer. Another thing with over the wire upgrades is that things can go very wrong if the cable is disconnected (oops, dropped the phone!) or if for whatever reason power is lost during the update. Over the air solutions tend to present the user with a little cleaner experience, not requiring additional hardware and providing robust protection should something go wrong like losing power/the battery during an update.

Can't wait to see a Nexus running 4.5x faster!