3x performance increase sounds entirely reasonable, I guess they are using this magic thing called JIT. I still can't wrap my head around the fact that Google to this day has the most basic, worst garbage collector in the whole wide world of virtual machines, and doesn't seem to care about performance. But as has already been mentioned here, they are at least working on a JIT compiler. Just seems to take them forever. And while you are at it Google, why not at add an incremental garbage collector or however this thing is called. And how about introducing a stack for temporary objects, so not every time I do: drawString("Score: " + score); the garbage collector kicks in and freezes the whole app for 200ms?