[fredliu]

I'm not sure the perceived "improvements" (especially regarding to the speed) is due to hardware or software upgrades, as NS is still the only official 2.3 game in town.

Hardware wise, Nexus S doesn't have a spec that can totally blow you away. But when N1 came, it was clear that N1 was the king, and it was so for quite a while.

[drivebyacct2]

The speed improvements are both. Hummingbird is a crazy beast but the low level touch improvements are showing. There is visible lag on my Mom's stock Droid 2.2 phone with few apps. Running a preliminary build of CM+AOSP 2.3 on my Droid is unbelievable. Same CPU speed, but my Droid now handles like a Droid X. It's truly, truly crazy.

The UI enhancements are subtle but have a huge effect. This feels like a bigger upgrade than 2.0 -> 2.2 was... (and this is just a AOSP build two days after source was released).

[Estragon]

This is quite exciting. Do you have notes on how you installed 2.3 on your droid? The lag from 2.2 drives me crazy, particularly when I go to the homescreen. (It did force me to learn the keyboard shortcuts for switching between applications, though.)

[drivebyacct2]

(Oh I forgot the new software keyboard rocks too).

Come to #koush. mtwebster has a very initial build. Google Apps won't apply correctly, but there is also a link floating around to a rather large patch that you can install after the initial build that gives you an old version of Gapps, but the Market updated instantly and I got all updated Gapps.

I can see if someone has written something up yet, if not I can throw something together, or, like I said, if you drop by #koush people will help you.

[Estragon]

Thanks, I will definitely check koush out in a couple of days. (Traveling at the moment, and can't afford to break my phone for now.)

[drivebyacct2]

Oh, well in that case, in a few days any info I'd give you would be out of date. Better builds with better gapps will be available very very soon.

[fredliu]

That's true. But I'm still a little bit underwhelmed by the raw horse power packed into NS, at least not as impressed as when N1 came out. Hummingbird may be the fastest on the market right now, but I'll probably bet on the next dual core 1.2 Ghz snapdragon phone for my next upgrade.

[drivebyacct2]

Dual core is appealing for a lot of reasons, especially if you buy the company lines about performance and battery life improving due to parallelism offered by two cores. Good luck finding a dual core phone that will easily run CyanogenMod though. That's why I have a little soft spot for Nexus S, even with some of its... missing hardware. :/