Last Monday, Motorola promised to release a system software upgrade for the Motorola Droid in the coming week. Eight days later, users of this smartphone are still waiting… probably impatiently. I know I am.
Clearly, the people who made this announcement jumped the gun a bit. Since then, Motorola spokespeople have been more cautious, promising that Android OS 2.1 is coming to the Droid, but not saying exactly when.
A timetable that leaked out of this company yesterday says it will be out by the end of next month, but I’m hoping it will be released before then. But at this point, we really don’t know.
What’s New?
The Droid’s version of Android OS 2.1 will offer much greater support for speech-to-text, allowing users to enter text into any application with just their voice.
In addition, the multi-touch gesture pinch-to-zoom will be added to the web browser and photo viewer. Android 2.0 has support for multi-touch, but Google did not include gestures like pinch-to-zoom into the bundled applications. This is starting to change — a version of Google Maps released last week already offers this gesture.
The version of OS 2.1 for the Droid will include the enhanced weather and news widgets that debuted with Android OS 2.1, and Google Goggles will be bundled as well.
It will also offer a fix for the bug that lets users bypass the security log-in, and also bring longer battery life.
