Hasta La Gadget!

While we were busy looking into external speaker problems on the Droid, it would seem Moto was itself hard at work remedying a separate issue with the device. A number of users on support forums have complained of the Droid’s camera failing to focus and giving them “red corners” when attempting to take pictures, but now — suddenly and without warning — their ailment has gone away as if touched by the hand of an omnipotent being (or, alternatively, a silent firmware update). This particular autofocus problem was mentioned in Verizon’s 5-page treatise on known issues with the Droid, though the planned resolution was an official update by December 11. The fix seems to have been delivered early, as green corners are sprouting up all around, but this silent update conduit sounds a bit nefarious, no?

Update: Sure enough, we can confirm from testing one of our own Droids that the issue has been resolved. The endless quest for the green focus box is over, and you can now finally begin scanning all your discount cards into Key Ring.

Update 2: And things have turned surreal. Dan Morrill, from Google’s Android team, has confirmed that there’s a date-related bug in the Droid’s camera software that leads to it having cycles of good and bad focus that depend on the date. Our own testing confirmed this, as backdating to the 11th of November returned those red bars of failure. Apparently, the cycles last 24.5 days, meaning that you’ll have good focus all the way to December 11, when the real fix is expected to drop. So breathe easy, Gotham, there are no phantom updates, just an oddly date-sentient camera.

[Thanks, AlexL and Kaiser]

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Filed under: Cellphones

Motorola Droid camera autofocus fixed in secrecy? (Update: it’s a date-related self-correction) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you were thinking of tearing apart your own Droid, let us direct you first to this quote straight from the folks at phoneWreck: “no easy task.” It seems that even finding some of the screws involved in holding the mess together was a problem, but at the end of the day, good old-fashioned human ingenuity prevailed over… well, other human ingenuity, and the phone fell asunder into the 16 pieces you see here. As you might imagine, there’s a bit of industrial magic involved in fitting a full QWERTY slide into a package this tight — but just as Moto was up to the challenge of putting it together, some dude with a little time on his hands was up to the challenge of asploding it. Needless to say, we won’t be doing this to ours.

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Motorola Droid torn down despite desperate cries of ‘no disassemble’ originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The last thing you want to hear about a few short days after a product’s launch is a litany of issues plaguing devices in the field, but that’s not quite what’s going on here — instead, this looks to be an extension of Verizon’s well-known policy of testing the crap out of devices until manufacturers are practically crying uncle. The carrier has already generated long internal lists of issues on both the DROID and DROID Eris, it seems, with the leaked documents revealing some five pages for the Motorola product and seven — yes, seven — for the HTC one; the good news is that they’re all slated to be fixed in one of two firmware updates slated for December and January windows. Again, knowing Verizon, these firmware updates could very well get stuck in the testing lab for another six years, but we’ll keep our hopes skyward.

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Verizon already prepping DROID and DROID Eris firmware updates? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Nov 2009 04:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you walk into a Verizon store today and pick up a DROID, you’ll be out $300 (before tax) out of pocket, then you’ll twiddle your thumbs for a few weeks while you wait for some mysterious PO box in Texas to send you your $100 rebate on a debit card. Wouldn’t you rather just pay $200 upfront? Or better yet, $150? Sears — which, we have to admit, we didn’t know sold phones — is charging just $150 without a rebate for the DROID today, a full $50 less than Big Red proper with rebate. We don’t know how good these guys are with customer service (Simplexity is running the store on Sears’ behalf, it seems), but truth be told, we can deal with a little incompetency for $50.

[Via I4U]

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PSA: Sears charging $50 less for new DROID activations than Verizon originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It appears that last night’s midnight opening in Manhattan went off like gangbusters, but the situation across the country is a little more subdued this morning with seemingly short lines and easy access to DROIDs at every location we’ve visited. We won’t put out a number, but we can confirm that several Engadget editors have taken the plunge today — and if riffraff like us can waltz into the store and get them, you should certainly be able to. Good luck being assimilated out there today, and be sure to post pictures of your experience in comments (up above we’ve got San Francisco’s first buyer courtesy of Ross Miller, and after the break, you can live it up with the good folks of Albany as they were paid a visit by Tim Stevens).

Continue reading DROID mania sweeps the nation, so to speak

DROID mania sweeps the nation, so to speak originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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