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Motorola DROID’s Autofocus Woes Change with the Moons

Categories: Android, Motorola
By: , IntoMobile
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 4:14 PM

So, a lot of Motorola droid owners haven’t been too happy with the 5 megapixel camera’s autofocus. In fact, it’s the single biggest complaint about the Android handset to date. All of a sudden, many have been reporting a drastic improvement in the camera, and attributing a silent over-the-air update, but as it turns out, the bug actually had a built-in (but unexpected) fix. Google Engineer Dan Morrill explains:

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.

Like some demented techno-werewolf, the autofocus on the droid will go feral in another 24.5 days, unless you manually set the date back to the clean period. Weirdest. Bug. Ever.

[Engadget via MobileCrunch]

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About The Author

Simon Sage

Simon Sage’s education largely surrounded writing, technology and online community, leading him to begin his blogging career at www.BlackBerryCool.com and to quickly discover a vibrant and active community surrounding BlackBerry and mobile technology. In exploring RIM’s platform, he has learned what enterprises are looking for in mobility as well as what makes the innocuous BlackBerry so appealing to them. Recently Simon’s been covering RIM’s gradual move into an already-crowded consumer market, and the impact of burgeoning challengers, such as the iPhone, as well as long-time leaders, like Nokia, on BlackBerry’s advancement. With plenty of content under his belt, Simon will be branching off a bit to see what other smartphone manufacturers are working on while still using BlackBerry as a barometer. At IntoMobile, you can count on his posts being even-handed, well-informed and thought-out.

  • Jon B

    Personally, I like blurry pix, so I hope this bug gets unfixed.

    Seriously, if this is the worst complaint about the phone, I better go buy a couple.

  • wirecup

    As big a production error as this is, it shows the quality of the QA testing (or total lack there of) accomplished on this product prior to its release. For supposedly being a Moto comeback product, it was screwed up, either by Verizon in not getting the proper QA work done or by Moto or maybe they both knew about the problem before the release but greed took over. This phone should never have been released with this problem. When does the recall begin? If you believe this 24.5 day cycle story, I will have a bridge for…..You know the story already.

  • Stijn van Drongelen

    Not such a weird bug, actually. 24.5 days is approximately 2^31 milliseconds, and such powers of two are pretty much magic numbers for software.

    Apparently, Android uses a 32-bit number to represent time on the millisecond scale, but (part of?) the autofocusing code interprets it as a ‘signed’ number. That is, that number looks positive for 24.5 days (=2^31 milliseconds) and counts forwards, then suddenly flips over to a negative number and counts up to zero. The rest of the Android software doesn’t expect this to happen and misbehaves during autofocusing.