Exclusive: New photos and details of official Froyo update for Dell Streak

Following up on yesterday's news about the Stage widgets that will included in the official Android 2.2 update for the Dell Streak, I've just received a bunch of new photos and some juicy details from my favorite anonymous tipster.

The build is still in beta, but it looks to be in pretty final form in terms of features. What's going on behind the scenes now seems focused on finding, reporting, and fixing bugs. So although there could still be changes made to the final build (this one, as you can see from the photo, is numbered 10688), my tipster gets the feeling that what's circulating now is very close to being done. Considering that the update is expected to be released this month, I'd say that makes sense.

I know that those of you who are running DJ_Steve's Froyo on their Streaks are probably wondering whether the official update will be worth checking out for yourself. Based on benchmarks I've received, the answer so far looks to be yes.

Benchmarks aren't everything, of course, and custom ROMs are almost always superior to a stock ROM, but the official beta build actually outperformed the unofficial build in both Linpack and Neocore:

• 32.331 MFLOPS (on my Streak with DJ_Steve's Froyo V1.1, I got 30.33MFLOPS)
• 34.5 fps (on my Streak with DJ_Steve's Froyo V1.1, I got 31.2 fps)

The difference in scores is incredibly minor, so it's not really about which one scored better. What's important here is that the benchmarks from both builds are really on the same level. So while it still remains to be seen which one is faster/smoother in day-to-day usage, the benchmark battle currently ends in a stalemate.

[Update 11.3: I've been informed by DJ_Steve that his build gets between 1300-1500 in Quadrant, while Dell's build gets around 670. For what it's worth, Quadrant always crashes for me on Steve's build and my source says it crashes on the official build too.]

Now let's get to the pics:

Other noteworthy tidbits about this beta build:

• Swype is included as the default keyboard.
• Home screen portrait mode is supported.
• Stage widgets automatically resize according to orientation.
• Front-facing camera works, both still and video, in all apps (not just Fring).
• There's no evidence of Dell's custom skin in this build (e.g., custom taskbar, black boxes around icons, etc.), but that doesn't mean it won't be added to the release version.
• The baseband of the Streak running this beta build indicates that it's an unlocked unit. Don't read anything into this. The only thing it confirms is that Dell is using at least one unlocked unit for testing, and I'm pretty sure we all knew that.

Thanks, anonymous tipster!