The article has a photo of the Nexus One with the new 2.2 running Linpack for Android at 37.597 MFLOPS. My stock Nexus One currently bangs out 6.602 MFLOPS which means that the 2.2 Android is running at 5.694 times the speed of mine! That is real world, and not manufacturer claims which are always a bit modest.

A big contributor to the jump in performance is the enablement of the JIT compiler in Android 2.2 which is seriously faster than the Dalvik compiler currently in use. I'm not sure why they didn't go with JIT at the outset. No doubt there are good reasons.

i have been running Cyanogen Android 2.1-update1 on my G1, it is a port of the Nexus One OS with enhancements and a few bits taken out where the G1's hardware does not support all of the functionality. In that release it is possible to enable the JIT. And when you do ... the performance improvement is significant although not quite as dramatic.

So it all bodes well for Android 2.2 on the Nexus One - and no doubt the other Android handsets such as the HTC Desire will follow some time after. I can understand why Google have intentions of updating what is their "reference" handset first. I'll be like a dog with two danglies when it arrives.