Droid Camera Autofocus Problem Fixed?

One of the most common complaints about the Motorola Droid has been the ability of the camera to auto-focus properly and take crisp pictures. Yesterday a thread was posted that alerted us to the fact that if you simply cleaned your lens well the camera would start working much better.
I tried this myself and also noticed immediate improvement in the ability of the camera to auto-focus and the quality of the pictures... as did many others.
Many ideas were circulating about what the fix might be besides simply cleaning the lens... a stealth over-the-air software update? It turns out it was neither a software update, or a cleaning issue.

work behind the scenes pushing out a silent update ahead of the oft-discussed OTA update due out on December 11th.

Dan Morrill gave us the real lowdown and let us know what was causing this baffling behavior of the camera suddenly fixing itself:

Quote

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 what have we learned? A simple software bug that fixed itself (and will soon break itself) is the culprit. Fortunately for us, before the software bug strikes again the upcoming OTA software update should fix it.

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