The upgrade from 2.2 to 2.3 was relatively painless and quick, though a few settings were lost along the way. For instance I had to login to Amazon again and my wireless hot spot settings needed to be reentered.
The overall look and feel of the GUI is more refined and at least as peppy as previous releases. I've noticed many little changes like the addition of profiles which I haven't actually used yet. Profiles apparently allow you to have up to three (and possibly more) different icon arrangements.
The built in camera support has been enhanced. Panorama assist used to require the user to enter left to right or right to left. Now it just figures it out based on the motion of the camera.
It's hard to judge battery life since my battery has been showing signs that it needs to be replaced recently so I have a new one on the way.
The biggest thing I've noticed though is the improvements in the wireless hot spot function. Prior to the 2.3 update I've never been very happy with the reliability of this feature. I've frequently had to power cycle my phone to get it to work and dropped connections were common. In limited testing with 2.3 I've had none of those problems. Hopefully I didn't just get lucky in my initial testing but I don't think that is the case. I've used the wireless hot spot regularly and never had as good an experience before. It's also nice that I had the option of telling the phone to never warn me again about the dangers of enabling the hot spot function.
As much as I like Android, prior to 2.3 Apple's iOS was a more refined experience. Google has made impressive strides with this release and at this point I don't feel like there is a significant gap. Having Apple and Google do their best to out innovate the other is going to be good for consumers and that really is becoming a two way street as the new notifications functionality in iOS 5 looks a lot like the one Android has had for awhile now.
Application stability has been good though I did notice one or two minor glitches right after the update. Downloading the latest releases of my apps seems to have resolved those. Overall phone stability has been as good or better than prior releases. I don't see any reason to delay in doing this update. The UI tweaks are subtle enough that there really isn't any noticeable learning curve in my experience.
Overall this phone has held up well. I've dropped it a few times along the way and even without a case it's survived. The screen has some minor scratches but nothing I notice normally. I'm kind of tough on phones so this is an impressive track record.
I don't feel any urge to upgrade to the second generation Droid X but I'll certainly take a very serious look at the third generation if Motorola produces one.
Image via Wikipedia
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