Droid Users Can Enjoy Auto-Focus Until December 11. Then, Auto-Focus Date Bug Returns!

Remember when the first generation Zune stopped working on (I believe) December 31, 2008 because of a leap year date calculation problem? Well, Google has joined Microsoft in creating a date based bug. This item in Engadget is almost surreal…

Motorola Droid camera autofocus fixed in secrecy? (Update: it’s a date-related self-correction)

Here’s a comment to article attributed to a Google Android engineer: There’s a rounding-error bug in the camera driver’s autofocus routine (which uses a timestamp) that causes autofocus to behave poorly on a 24.5-day cycle. That is, it’ll work for 24.5 days, then have poor performance for 24.5 days, then work again.

The 17th is the start of a new “works correctly” cycle, so the devices will be fine for a while. A permanent fix is in the works.

So, Droid users (like me) should be able to auto-focus until around mid-day December 11. A Verizon technical note discussed here earlier talked about a December 11 Droid update. So, a permanent fix may be available by then.

To be honest, I’m not too impressed by the Droid’s 5-megapixel camera so far with or without autofocus. It has a very grainy look IMHO.

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