Motorola Droid and the 2.1 Update

Being impatient for the update (my wife is still waiting and I'm out of town) I manually updated my Droid to the 2.1 update. The directions are clearly outlined here:

http://www.androidcentral.com/how-manually-update-your-droid-android-21

This update was to give the phone a lot of the features that you see on the Google Nexus One. Clearly we couldn't expect everything that the Nexus One has in 2.1 because it has about half the processing, but I'm a little disappointed with what we did get. Here are the big updates.

• Voice input on the keyboard
• News and weather widget/app
• Live wallpaper
• Nexus One Gallery
• Slightly different music player

Voice input on the keyboard

This feature is awesome. There is now a new button on the onscreen keyboard to start the speech to text engine. Say a few words like you do with a voice search and bam, it puts those words in for you. Same accuracy as the voice search. Not 100% but does the job. The disappointment here is this feature is not in places that helps me in the car. Voice search doesn't help me find music on my phone or anything. With all the bluetooth going on in my car, this would be a huge plus. But it doesn't. STINK.

News and Weather widget/app

I believe this is a feature is something that came with the Nexus One. Gives you a widget to see the current weather and headlines in various categories and then an app to drill in and get more information. The news part is a bit lacking, you can only customize it based on keywords. I think the best part of this app is the weather features. Tap the weather part of the widget and it gives you the 7 day forcast. Hit today's weather and it gives you a great bit of info on whats going on outside. This includes a temperature and humidity graph that you can scroll to see what these items will be in the next 24 hours.

Live Wallpaper

At the moment, this is strictly an "ooo-ahh" feature. Gives you wallpaper with animation and maybe, just maybe some useful information. The most you can get out of one of these wallpapers now is the google maps wallpaper that shows your current location. This seems dumb as it will probably drain your battery using the gps. But, I haven't tested so I don't know for sure. Right now I have it set to a wallpaper that shows some blades of grass blowing in the wind along with the sky which is based on the time of day. Noontime its bright blue, night time you get a dark sky with stars. Its kinda neat but I wish it would go further to base the sky on the current weather at your location. All in all you can't ask for too much from this feature and it does add some flair to the phone.

Nexus One Gallery

The photo gallery got totally revamped for the Nexus One and now its on the Droid. It breaks your photos up a lot like iphoto or picasa and gives you a nice gesture based navigation to view them. The REALLY nice feature is that it now pulls your picasa albums in automatically and puts them in the navigation as if the photos existed on the phone's memory. Great for showing off a large number of pictures.

Music Player

There really isn't much to say here. Some of the navigation flow on the player is still awkward and it seems the biggest addition to the player is the zune like use of an albums cover-art when browsing songs. I think I would still rather use another music player or just be lazy and power-up Pandora.

All in all the update did make my Droid better as a whole. Its a bit more flashy (not to confuse you, still no adobe flash on it). I do think that the phone operates a little better and seems less laggy. The biggest disappoint is no Adobe Flash. I'm a Flex advocate, I want my apps to work on my device's browser. But its coming soon (so I'm told). Also no additional home screens. The new pieces that we did get did not live up to the hype of the update as a whole, but are greatly appreciated.

If you have a Droid, install the update when it comes to your phone (being pushed out slowly). Or if you're like me, do the manual update listed above. My only problem doing it manually was that I needed to hold volume-up then camera to get to the boot menu. Otherwise it worked spot on.