Well. At least it makes it suck less.

I bought a Droid the day it came out. While it was a tremendous improvement over my BlackBerry, I’ve been disappointed with the phone overall. The battery cover comes off constantly ([2]2, [3]3), the phone’s proximity sensor was extraordinarily finicky (usually resulting in me hitting the “mute” button with my cheek in the middle of a call), the camera was all but useless, and, for reasons I did not really understand, my Android developer phone running Android 1.6 provided a much smoother user experience than the vastly-more-powerful-on-paper Droid. In other words, the Droid was a solid upgrade from what I had, but still disappointing. I have to agree with Dave Winer’s now-famous rant on why the Droid sucks.

Last night, Motorola and Google unleashed Android 2.0.1 as an over-the-air update. While the update does little about the battery cover, it seems, at least so far, to resolve nearly all of the software issues. The proximity sensor’s logic seems improved, though not perfect; many operations are visually smoother (although oddly still not universally as smooth as the G1); the camera’s usable taking pictures, rather than mocking the incompetence of Motorola’s engineers; and there have even been some very nice visual refinements to fonts and color schemes. Best of all, and unusual for the first update to a new device, nothing broke: sudoku, SpacePhysics, Twidroid, TripIt, and other applications seem to still be working just fine.

So if you were previously hesitant about buying a Droid for software reasons, and don’t really have a problem using $2 double-sided tape to compensate for Motorola’s QA team having the same skill as an inebriated eight-year-old, I think you’ll be much happier with your purchase now than you’d have been a month ago. Otherwise, you might want to wait for the next Android-powered phone on Verizon and see if it works better. It’s certainly unlikely to be worse.