Why is drawing bitmaps is very slow on some android 2.2 phones?

Question

I have a simple card game where the user can drag and drop cards around the screen. On some of the 2.2 android phones like the Droid and EVO the card drawing is very slow. This is strange because it happens on some of the faster phones. However it's not all phones I test on the Droid and Droid X and the program runs great also runs good on slower phone like the G1. I started getting reports about this after Motorolla released the 2.2 update for the Droid.

Here's the fix I came up with but it really lowers the quality of my graphics. Gradients look horrible.

I changed this

Bitmap.createBitmap(newBmp.getWidth(), newBmp.getHeight(), Bitmap.Config.ARGB_8888);

to this

Bitmap.createBitmap(newBmp.getWidth(), newBmp.getHeight(), Bitmap.Config.ARGB_4444);

The problem goes away but the looks suffer. I need to keep the alpha channel so I can't use RGB_565. Is there some way to keep my quality images and not make it run so slow?