One puzzling nuance of the Verizon Droid from the day it was released to the public is the need to change settings in the native Youtube application to display high quality video as opposed to pixelated, low-quality versions of the same stream. In the eyes of several reviewers this appeared to be a bit of an odd oversight. Why would a phone, whose resolution is a crystal clear  854 x 480 pixels, be configured to show Youtube videos at the default 320 x 240 resolution when it’s reasonably easy to configure for the much sharper 640 x 360 high quality resolution?

Google now appears to be sending email messages to new Droid owners instructing them how to change the resolution of videos on the fly. It’s obvious that the point of the messge is to provide a handful of “How-To” video tutorials for other functionality on the phone, but the seemingly-subtle configuration change is what stands out like a sore thumb in the email.

The message:

From: Android Team [no-reply@android.com]
To: xxx@gmail.com

Your new Android-powered phone has many cool and useful features. Learn more by clicking on the links to watch brief YouTube videos directly on your phone.

Once the video has started playing, press your phone’s menu key, select “More,” and then select “Watch in high quality” to view the video in higher resolution:

You can find all these videos and more on the Android 2.0 playlist at youtube.com/androidtips.

Enjoy!
The Android Team at Google

Google, Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

We sent you this one-time welcome message because you recently purchased an Android-powered phone

Perhaps it’s not that big of a deal. The reason for the default configuration could have been pointed more toward saving bandwidth on both the Verizon and Youtube networks rather than representing a missed default configuration setting. For a carrier, however, who has taken exceptional measures to market the coverage and capacity of it’s network, it seems more like a flub.

Post-script: The Droid phone I purchased from Best Buy on the day it was available to the public had been experiencing bizarre hardware issues which were bad enough to request a replacement from my local Verizon store — which they will do within the first 30 days of purchase. I received this message after the exchange and not after the initial purchase.

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