My dear friend who knows Far More about consumer electronics than I do wrote to me about his experience updating his iPod Touch with the 2.1 firmware. This is what he had to say:
- Has the new iTunes 'Genius Playlist' feature ON the touch
- Performance seems a bit faster overall
- Backs up with iTunes MUCH faster
-
Gets POP mail (Comcast, Yahoo, etc) MUCH faster and reads some Yahoo
Groups mail that comes to my Comcast account MUCH better than before
(sometimes used to show mail but not download the content)
- The LOCATION circle of where I am seems to be smaller
and better positioned. I THINK they've improved the wi-fi accuracy quite a bit
I hope the iPhone fixes are as good as the touch ones appear to be!"
My own experience with the upgrade was very satisfactory. My heart is always in my throat whenever I do a firmware upgrade of any kind due to my history of bricking gadgets of every stripe during similar operations. (Nothing resembles a brick more than a bricked Newton.) Anyhoo, after I worked through the usual panic attack, my iPhone surfaced quite nicely and, I guess, is running better. Honestly, I don't notice much difference.
I haven't written to you about my iPhone so I'll share these thoughts with you now:
1. The UI is like ... something very sweet and delicious and probably bad for you. Apple is without a peer when it comes to UI and the iPhone is spectacular.
2. The apps ... while I liked the free market economy of Palm apps, I deeply respect how Apple is bringing the apps to users. If I were a developer, I would be Very Grateful that Apple went out of its way to build this infrastructure.
3. Battery. I've read various dings on the battery life, but my experience is this: Because I use the phone so much more than an "ordinary" cell phone, the battery takes a bit of a hit. What's really being described as dings on battery life are symptoms of how bloody useful the iPhone is. I've installed fifty-one apps to my iPhone and I really do use most of them at least once a day. eReader is a Very Strong eBook application. Facebook is a great interface and I would argue better than the one on my screen. I have my iPhone activesyncing with my company's Exchange server and gMail is onboard through IMAP. (Please don't use POP for gMail because you deserve better than that and IMAP is just as easy to set up.) This is my first location-based appliance and it has already saved my biscuits from burning on more than one occassion. --So, yeah, I'm using it A Lot more than my previous cell phone. Battery hit? No surprise.
4. More about the apps. I really appreciate the fact that Apple has extended itself to content people so that they can present their web-based apps so conveniently on the iPhone. Remember The Milk is swell on the iPhone. LinkedIn really works great on the iPhone and I'm sure both of these "applications" for the iPhone (really just a different html frontend) was easy to develop. Good work here.
5. And I want more. I'm impatient when I find something that hasn't be customized for my iPhone. I want someone to write a frontend to LiveJournal Righ Now so I can more easily keep up with my friends there. I want Wells Fargo to make it just a little bit easier for me to bank over my iPhone (as long as there isn't a trade off with security). And I'd like some more device-to-device appls like I had on my Palm that lets me share things more easily with other iPhones. (But suspect that DRM worries prevent this.) And I want a ton of peer-to-peer Wi-Fi enabled location-based apps that I can't even imagine right now but fully anticipate some Smart Young Thing is already hard at work on.
I took my time moving from the Treo to the iPhone and I'm glad I waited for the 3G to arrive before I got in line. And I'm very glad I didn't wait any longer. Very Pleased.
