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Android gets faster apps, better graphics, longer battery life

Mobile middleware developer Myriad has unveiled a turbo boosted version of the Dalvik virtual machine, which runs applications on the Android platform, boosting performance and battery life.

Dalvik Turbo, announced Tuesday, claims to bring a threefold performance increase to applications, richer game graphics and better battery life. The tool is a replacement for the Dalvik virtual machine, which ships as part of the Android platform, and retains full compatibility with existing software. Dalvik Turbo also supports a range of processors including those based on ARM, Intel Atom and MIPS Architectures.

Myriad was created from the merger of Esmertec and Purple Labs and develops a, er, myriad of mobile software including browsers and Java engines.

At the end of last year Benoit Schillings, who joined Nokia as CTO after its 2008 acquisition of Scandinavian mobile Linux firm Trolltech, joined Myriad in a similar capacity. At Nokia Schillings was responsible for Nokia’s cross-device technology as advisor to CEO, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. The industry heavyweight is considered something of a technology guru, known for his design and development of the technically sound but commercially unviable Be operating system (BeOS). He also held the CTO position at OpenWave.

Schillings was the driving force behind Trolltech’s Qt cross platform application framework, which was at the heart of the acquisition by Nokia and would better allow the Finnish firm and third party developers to build web applications that work across Nokia’s device portfolio – a key part of the Ovi concept.

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7 comments

  1. Avatar bobby critical 10/02/2010 @ 2:47 am

    If this is true, lets see a tech demo showing it. I heard your dad is stronger than my dad, too, but until we put them face to face I don’t really believe you.

  2. Avatar Jaap 10/02/2010 @ 7:39 am

    I can believe it’s faster but 3x seems like a marketing trick.Probably there are some instructions are so that run 3x but on average 3x I simply do not belief

  3. Avatar Sarreq Teryx 10/02/2010 @ 8:18 am

    excellent! will we actually see this in Android, and if so, when?

  4. Avatar Papadrioni 10/02/2010 @ 11:13 am

    Is is as buggy, as their JVM for VxWorks? Does their GC still looses memory in concurrent mode, 20 bytes at a time, I wonder?
    This is not a joke.

  5. Avatar Aaron Weiss 10/02/2010 @ 3:28 pm

    I’d be happy with any performance increase. The biggest complaint–actually I really don’t complain that much about it–is the speed when I’m multitasking.

  6. Avatar Ammar Mardawi 11/02/2010 @ 8:00 pm

    If it is now 3x faster, then the current version is at least 3x slower than it should be.

    There does not seem to be any technical breakthroughs that allowed this performance gain. They probably fixed issues that shouldn’t be there in the first place.

  7. Avatar Cuno Pfister 17/02/2010 @ 3:03 pm

    Well yes, there is one. A very old one, in fact. Dalvik is an interpreter, while Dalvik Turbo compiles intermediate code upon class loading into native machine code.

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