Droid 3 camera

[aostang]

last week, i was so excited to get the Droid 3 and have been having the worst problems with it. I almost suspect my phone is just a lemon..

anyone else have these problems??

google maps navigation: all addresses i try to navigate to the GPS consistently fails and will not register where I am or registers me within a 5 mile zone of where i actually am. My GPS signal is turned on and i have reinstalled the application to see if it was buggy.. i was traveling to san diego and got severely lost and had to rely on the actual map view to figure out how to get to where i was going.. the directions were consistently inaccurate. My Droid 1 (or the first droid on the market) never had any navigation problems and was excellent

speed: the speed of the phone opening apps is slower than my droid 1. its a 3-5 sec delay before the app opens such as facebook or calendar

camera: its a bummer the only button you can take a picture with is the touch sensor button, taking photos at night are beyond poor, fuzzy and unusable with the flash.. many of my friends cameras were taken decent night photos and i was all excited to try out my new droid 3 and horrible unusable results. i double checked, triple checked settings and it was all set

actual phone dialing: took 3-5 seconds to pull up contacts and when i dialed someone, sometimes it would not respond to the end call button and i couldnt disconnect

speaker phone: sucks on my droid 3.. i normally use speaker phone when im driving and i am unable to use this feature with my driod 3 bc i've received consistent complaints that my caller can not hear me... (compared to me always using speaker phone on my droid 1 and there was never a problem)

does anyone have these problems?

I have none of those issues. With regard to everything besides the GPS and speaker phone, it sounds like you have some offending app taking too much CPU time. The camera does take a few seconds to load, but most other apps should be faster than the D1 and open fairly instantaneously.

With regard to the GPS, I never had location problems that you've described. Mine is as accurate and responsive as it should be. While the above is most likely a software issue, the GPS problem you mentioned is more likely a hardware problem with the GPS antenna.

I've never had anyone complain about my voice quality and the speaker phone is definitely loud enough for me. I have a LOT of work done to my car, so I use the hands-free through my radio so that I don't have to use the speaker phone there. I have no problem hearing it if I use it in an average public environment, though.

I'd take it to Verizon and have a tech look at it. Maybe they can isolate the app causing the unresponsiveness for you and tell you better whether the GPS problem is hardware-related.

 

[mothbeast]

last week, i was so excited to get the Droid 3 and have been having the worst problems with it. I almost suspect my phone is just a lemon..

anyone else have these problems??

google maps navigation: all addresses i try to navigate to the GPS consistently fails and will not register where I am or registers me within a 5 mile zone of where i actually am. My GPS signal is turned on and i have reinstalled the application to see if it was buggy.. i was traveling to san diego and got severely lost and had to rely on the actual map view to figure out how to get to where i was going.. the directions were consistently inaccurate. My Droid 1 (or the first droid on the market) never had any navigation problems and was excellent

speed: the speed of the phone opening apps is slower than my droid 1. its a 3-5 sec delay before the app opens such as facebook or calendar

camera: its a bummer the only button you can take a picture with is the touch sensor button, taking photos at night are beyond poor, fuzzy and unusable with the flash.. many of my friends cameras were taken decent night photos and i was all excited to try out my new droid 3 and horrible unusable results. i double checked, triple checked settings and it was all set

actual phone dialing: took 3-5 seconds to pull up contacts and when i dialed someone, sometimes it would not respond to the end call button and i couldnt disconnect

speaker phone: sucks on my droid 3.. i normally use speaker phone when im driving and i am unable to use this feature with my driod 3 bc i've received consistent complaints that my caller can not hear me... (compared to me always using speaker phone on my droid 1 and there was never a problem)

does anyone have these problems?

Not that it will help with your picture quality but you can also slide out the keyboard and hit OK to take a picture.

I haven't have any of the other problems you describe.

 

[BradChesney79]

I just wanted to give this thread a bump because my camera on my cutting edge phone has worse quality than the camera on my phone that was made over five years ago. No, it need not compete with a DSLR. But it does need to beat my old Samsung that couldn't use a microSD card bigger than 2GB.

Don't get me wrong, this phone in general is awesome. I love me a qwerty with real buttons. So much is right that the camera seems particularly bad.

Several months later the camera problem persists for me and my wife. Specifically: the camera app is slow, the pictures often are tinted blue, they are blurry, they are grainy, sometimes they have a visible pattern ingrained that looks like a crocheted blanket, and because my wife likes to leave the app open sometimes it locks up her phone. One issue, okay. Two issues, not good. This many problems is near inexcusable.

 

[HadouGhost]

Brad, you two probably have bad phones (which is likely) I have none of the problems you speak of. My pictures look great, are no longer blue tinted, and the camera opens fast.

 

[redsox985]

Are you running version 5.6.890? (settings -> about phone listed under "System Version")

 

[BradChesney79]

My camera is still a little blue regardless of what I do.

I have downloaded LittlePhoto (free) for quick captures and CameraZoom FX (paid) when I can take my time and fiddle with the settings. I can almost get rid of the blue with CameraZoom FX. Having nicer pictures comes at the cost of speed for me though. (Even after a manual autokiller sweep on top of the stuff killed automatically.)


Redsox985:
The system version is reported as: 5.6.890.XT862.Verizon.en.US

HadouGhost:
I may go to a corporate store to make sure I didn't get a dud. That other people are so much happier than I am is unusual. I am really forgiving and have pretty low standards. I still happily use a 800FSB Mobile Core2 Duo. I'm not even looking to upgrade any time soon.

----------Superfluous fluff below, you've been warned.----------

I'm not tech ignorant either. I've had a Zenithink ZT-180 tablet for over a year that I hook up to my Kubuntu workhorse to run ADB connection commands. I update my spl and ROM regularly enough to upgrade or downgrade my tablet as testing for work requires.

I have not rooted my Droid 3 for lack of a good reason to do so; tethering comes factory installed, overclocking won't significantly fix any problems I'm having, I can pay $5 or so here and there when necessary for apps, I have an okay rooted tablet for dev work.

The rest of the phone... golden. I can't say enough good things about everything else on this phone. (I wish the TF card were easier to get at. Got used to using a sneakernet. --But the Droid 3 connects via SFTP to my NAS, so that is something I'm just going to have to get over.)

The camera, I want the camera team leader's head on a stick.

 

[DeadChex]

Mind taking a couple pictures of things including just white and posting them unaltered? It may help, or not, just a thought.

Edit: Moto is cutting jobs so the camera guy may be no more, but i know a guy who can get people if ya need

 

[redsox985]

Have you tried Camera360? That's what I like to use. I have no complaints about it.

 

[MicroNix]

The camera quality has been good but the speed of taking pictures is downright pathetic. I've gone to 7 seconds just for the thing to focus and take a picture after the screen locks up and then jags around. There is a petition on the Moto forums right now that when ICS comes out for the D3, that they DON'T include their camera software and go with stock ICS camera. That's how bad Moto's software is on the D3. This phone *requires* a 3rd party camera app to even be functional if you don't enjoy telling people to keep smiling while this thing tries to get out of its own way to take a picture. And this was *not* like this pre-update. This is going to be my last Motorola phone unless this gets fixed. If your D3 doesn't act like this, consider yourself one of the lucky few.

 

[HadouGhost]

Download camera360, set it up so it goes straight to the camera when you open it. You'll be amazed at how fast it opens and snaps a picture. In 3 actual seconds I can open the app, focus and take a picture

 

[Abb0nz]

Download camera360, set it up so it goes straight to the camera when you open it. You'll be amazed at how fast it opens and snaps a picture. In 3 actual seconds I can open the app, focus and take a picture

I agree, Camera360 seems to be the best so far. I seem to be lucky in that I don't have the blue tint issue or any of the other photo issues. My biggest beef was that it could take 3-5 seconds for the photo to be taken. No good for snap shots at all.

 

[oaklane]

I downloaded the Camera 360 and took some really cool pictures of the moon and clouds but I guess I didn't save them so now they are gone. I got so mad that I uninstalled the app but I'll try it again cause it was fast.

 

[Abb0nz]

I like it but having to save each pic as you take it is a bit of a pain.

 

[redsox985]

I like it but having to save each pic as you take it is a bit of a pain.

IIRC, you can turn this off so that it auto saves without preview, or auto saves after a short preview period where you can choose to delete it if it's not what you want.