We’ve managed to snag an unlocked HTC Desire and popped a bit of Android 2.2 action on there to see if it really is much better.

We’ll get to the good news early: it is much better indeed. From an improved battery to much less choppy video recording, any slight foibles the HTC Desire had in our review have now been rectified.

Speed upgrade

One of the main upgrades with Android 2.2 is the just-in-time compiler, which improves the speed of the device in benchmark testing, and has worked wonders on the Google Nexus One.

On the HTC Desire it’s less noticeable because the phone simply swished through menus and screens with no hint of slowdown, but when it comes to web browsing things are indeed a little quicker.

But the JIT compiler doesn’t just speed up the OS, it makes it more efficient too, which helps alleviate that glaring problem: the HTC Desire has an awful battery life, often not lasting the day between charges.

Thankfully that’s been sorted with Android 2.2, where we found taking the phone off charge at 8AM would mean we still had 15-20% battery life when we stumble in at 12AM, even with push notifications and Wi-Fi on.

It’s not stellar, but it does take the HTC Desire into the ‘normal’ realm of smartphone power consumption

HD video

HD video recording has also been added into the Desire with the Froyo update, but it’s not quite the update we were hoping for.

True, the choppy video has been improved with more pixels, but it’s still grainy, a little blocky and simply goes to pieces in dark rooms, so this won’t be the next device you’ll use to become the next Paris Hilton.

It also still outputs movies in 3GP format, which does nothing to help the overall quality – we’ll wait for the HTC Desire HD to see if that improves things.

Wi-Fi hotspot support is included, and this is another feature that completely changes the overall use of the phone, especially if you’re a laptop/Wi-Fi iPad user.

It’s a simple thing to set up: turn it on, change the name of the network and the password you want to use, and you’ve got a fully-fledged Wi-Fi hotspot to play with.

Of course, if you use it regularly it’s going to eat up all your data and connection speed is dependent on your 3G signal, but if you need a quick bit of web access on a larger device then this can’t be beaten as an option.

Flash video

Flash video is included by default with Android 2.2, and while the HTC Desire could manage it anyway, the new 10.1 build is much more efficient, able to play Flash video natively in web pages.

However, we do miss the way HTC used to play the video on the Desire, as a double tap on the Flash file would take it automatically full screen – this is an intermittent feature on the Desire so it’s hard to work out how to use it at times.

Things like BBC iPlayer are much better now though, as despite not being able to use the full version of the site (it defaults to mobile version) but the overall feel is slick, despite not being able to download videos.

Install to SD card

We’re still yet to see the full benefits of being able to install applications to microSD card, but there’s no doubt this is going to be a very beneficial feature in the future.

Understandably, given there are very few phones using Android 2.2 in the world today, there aren’t many applications written that make use of the new feature, but for developers this is a big deal as they can finally flex their coding muscles and make some much larger and resource-hungry applications.

Other little additions, like including a Flashlight application and the ability to share applications with friends as standard, are all great things to have and help make your HTC Desire feel like a new phone.

Overall, Android 2.2 is a real boost for the HTC Desire, which was already a great phone.

Battery life is overhauled, video is (somewhat) improved and the Wi-Fi hotspot addition is really nice.

It’s a free upgrade too, and once the networks pull their collective fingers out and offer the update to all users (as well as putting Android 2.2 on newly sold HTC Desires) then the popularity of the phone will just go upwards.

We’ve only been playing with this for a few days now, so we’ll be overhauling our HTC Desire review in the near future so you can see how it really will change your phone.

Mark Papermaster, the senior executive that Apple worked so hard to pry from the 25-year grip of former employer IBM, is leaving the company after only two years in charge of the iPod and iPhone engineering teams.

Inevitably, there’s speculation that he’s been fired because of the iPhone 4′s much-publicised aerial problems. But it may not be that simple.

Papermaster’s job at Apple was not exactly a natural leap from his role at IBM, where he oversaw the development of blade servers – highly technical, unsexy, generally invisible kit for corporate IT farms.

That made him a surprising choice to head development of the world’s most covetable consumer devices, and in fact he wasn’t Apple’s ideal candidate.

This normally private bit of corporate gossip became public when documents were released during the legal battle over Papermaster’s right to move to a rival company. As reported at the time by AppleInsider, Apple started its search in 2007 for a successor to Tony Fadell – essentially the inventor of the iPod, and a hard pair of shoes to fill – and immediately hit a brick wall:

“Although several of the people we interviewed possessed the technical skills necessary to understand the complex design of the iPod and iPhone, they lacked the managerial and leadership skills… Moreover, in many cases we did not believe that the candidates would fit into Apple’s culture.”

Long shot

These words may have come back to haunt HR boss Danielle Lambert, who eventually hired Papermaster as one of several recommendations from Bob Mansfield, the respected head of the Mac engineering division. The IBM veteran was “near the bottom of the list” and “a long shot” in every respect except his general knowledge of semiconductors. It seems to have been his personality and leadership skills that swung it.

Not for long. According to a Wall Street Journal story yesterday, “Several people familiar with Mr Papermaster’s situation said his departure was driven by a broader cultural incompatibility.” In other words, he just didn’t fit in.

Speaking to the Guardian, Brian Marshall, an analyst with US-based Gleacher & Company, expressed this rather nicely in Jobsian terms: “At the end of the day, it might have been that he didn’t have enough T-shirts and blue jeans in his closet.”

Steve is, of course, notorious for his uncompromising management style. As Leander Kahney, writing for Wired in 2008, put it: “Whereas the rest of the tech industry may motivate employees with carrots, Jobs is known as an inveterate stick man.” As Steve himself puts it, “My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better.” Which is a long way from saying “My job is to chuck them out over one mistake.”

Inherited problem?

Was Antennagate even Papermaster’s mistake? Although in overall charge of hardware development, he must have inherited Apple’s aerial development programme, and this was some way outside his own field: IBM doesn’t make mobile phones.

Apparently the issues with the external aerial configuration, an innovation that seems to have been favoured by Jonathan Ive, had been openly discussed for some time. Ultimately, the decision to go with the iPhone 4′s design would have been Jobs’. It doesn’t ring true that he’d blame someone else for a factor he’d already been made aware of before taking that decision.

Of course, the aerial hasn’t been the only problem with the iPhone 4. Apple has also failed to produce the white edition, which remains delayed due to manufacturing difficulties. But you’d expect a head further down the management chain to be on the block for such a specific technical gaffe. In any case, isn’t this, again, more in Ive’s department?

One way to approach the question of what provoked an employee’s departure is to look for the first signs of him being sidelined. As tech pundit John Gruber has pointed out, at the high-profile launch of the iPhone 4 back in June, not only was Papermaster not wheeled out to talk about the product in general, but even the semiconductor stuff was handled in the video presentation by Bob Mansfield – the man who originally, gingerly, recommended him for the role.

As my granny used to say: you don’t have a dog and bark yourself. Not unless you picked the wrong dog.

Apple didn’t know then that the antenna problem was going to blow up. So was Papermaster already on the way out? It might be even worse than that. An Apple spokesperson told the WSJ that Mansfield, the Mac engineering boss, was already in charge of elements of the iPhone 4, including the A4 processor chip – smack in the one area of technology that Papermaster knew from his IBM job.

If he wasn’t responsible for this stuff, what was he responsible for?

Embarrassing as the iPhone 4′s problems have been, it seems unlikely that Papermaster is merely taking the fall. Perhaps the biggest reason why he’s leaving Apple is that one day everybody sat down and looked at each other and nobody could quite remember what he was doing there in the first place.

Remember back in the day when Google was only activating 100,000 Android units a day? You should — it was May. By June, that number had jumped to 160,000 units a day. And today it now stands at 200,000 Android units activated a day. That’s pretty incredible.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed as much today during a sit down with a group of journalists after his panel at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA. When asked about how the Android platform is doing, Schmidt was