Boost Android Performance And Battery Life

Those of you running a device with the Android operating system can look forward to potentially boosting device performance up to 300% while at the same time increasing battery life. Sound too good to be true? Maybe, maybe not.Myriad Group AG, a German company issued a press release earlier this week making the performance claims. They call it the Dalvik Turbo virtual machine which would replace the Dalvik VM that Google includes with Android.

Obvious uses for more speed would be better performance in processor intensive applications like action games, user interface interaction and video. That all of this happens while actually helping battery life makes it that much better.

In reading comments about this at various sites, it appears this new VM has been in testing for several months and each release gets better with compatibility with existing applications. That is the risk you run with something like this though that not all apps may work properly.

Myriad will be demonstrating this at their booth at Mobile World Congress, which starts this coming Monday. There are no official release dates yet.

This kind of thing appeals to die hard fans of mobile devices. Windows Mobile users have those that run cooked ROMs on their devices and iPhone users have a small cadre that run jail broken phones to eek out the most from their device. Unlike those examples though, there shouldn't be anything illegal or shady about running this new VM on your device.

I still wouldn't expect the majority of users to modify their phone to run this. They just want a decent smartphone platform and on that Android does a fine job already. It would be interesting to see if Android OEMs built future devices using this VM. They might get performance bragging rights but run the risk of compatibility issues with some apps, something that developers would have to watch out for. With so many flavors of Android out there now, a change like this just adds to the potential fragmentation issues Android faces.