Motorola Droid's strange camera bug

I have been seeing a lot of blog posts, discussions, and tweets about a bug in the Motorola Droid phone that causes autofocus to fail on certain dates and work on others.

I decided to talk to Mike Gikas, a Senior Electronics editor here at Consumer Reports to see if he could replicate the problem. I brought along my pocket video camera to record the action.

Mike's findings confirm that the autofocus bug is somehow date related. Images taken with the camera set to November 11th, were very blurry. Images taken with the camera set to November 17th were much more in focus. (Click on the images to see examples.)

Many blogs are reporting that the bug cycles every 24.5 days. Since the camera currently appears to be working correctly, users may be able to coast until December 11, when a patch for the Droid is expected to fix this problem.

We'll check back with Mike and other Consumer Reports experts after December 11th to see if a permanent fix has been released. —Dirk Klingner

Comments

[ted]

The droid also has a serious sound/speaker bug, where mysteriously and at no warning all sounds to include the ringer will come out of the earpiece and not the ringer. The requires a soft reboot to fix. This is a serious problem. In addition, the screen sensor does not always detect when you have moved your face away from the phone when ending a call, thus keeping you on line. This is also a serious bug. These problems need to be addressed.