I turned my Motorola Droid on the other day and a screen popped up telling me that it was time to upgrade to version 2.1. Who am I to argue?

After hitting ignore a few times, I finally went ahead with the upgrade. It was rather painless. I think the phone powered down, then powered back up again and did it’s thing. I would say it took all of two minutes. That’s what I love about the Droid…it’s simplicity.

So, what was the purpose of this upgrade? What did I get out of it? Well, here is what the email from Verizon Wireless informed me of when I received it the day after…

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Thank you for recently upgrading your DROID by Motorola to the Android 2.1 Operating System. With your upgrade, you can now take advantage of these great enhancements:

- Yahoo!® email sync: access free Yahoo email accounts right from your DROID device.

- Pinch-to Zoom within the Browser and Gallery.

- News and Weather app and Widget: pulls information you care about from the web and brings it to your fingertips.

- Voice-to-text entry: compose text and emails with the touch of a button or a swipe across the virtual keyboard.

- New Gallery app: view your pictures in 3-D layout.

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I have to say, the voice-to-text is really cool. I tried it out today with a few emails and it really works great. It’s very accurate. Actually, it made no mistakes. I really saw the power with that application and even thought for a second about how a similar application could help me with blog posts. Then, I thought that I would forget how to type if I did that. I’ll stick with things the way they are.

Another really awesome new feature is called “Live wallpapers.” Instead of choosing from boring old still images as your phone background, now you get to choose from those boring backgrounds, plus a few animated ones. They are fairly graceful and non-intrusive. I just reset my phone’s background as the swaying grass animation. So cool.

Here are a few photos of the upgraded features.

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