Derrick’s Musings

After updating my iPhone to v. 2.1, I first noticed that the graphic “E” to indicate being connected to the EDGE network has been inverted. It is now a solid white E against the black background or a solid blue E against the grayish background in most apps. Nothing else ground breaking on the home screen, but I didn’t expect there to be.

The Genius playlist creation didn’t appear to be working at first, however, as noted by people around the net, you need to sync your iPhone with your Genius-enabled Mac or PC first. After doing so, the Genius playlist and button appeared.

Apple would seem to have fixed a major gripe I’ve had with the iPod app even since getting my iPod touch earlier this year. It always bothered me that the list of songs did not include Artist/Album information. With this update, this information is now displayed and makes it much easier to search through the list of songs in my opinion.

My keyboard problem would seem to be gone and text messages seem a bit snappier than before. Though trivial, this was one of my big gripes.

I did not notice “dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes” as the update notes said I would. It seemed about the same length. Although speaking of iTunes, one thing I did notice is the addition of an “Apps” category in the Capacity bar shown on the device information page. That’s cool, but it seems to not include previously installed apps, as those still appeared under “Other”. Update: I guess I just needed to give it some time to categorize them as “Apps”. When I plugged in my iPhone later, the proper size in MBs appeared.

Somethings I can’t really comment on until I’ve used the phone for a bit longer. These include:

• Decrease in call set-up failures and dropped calls
• Significantly better battery life for most users
• Improved email reliability, notably fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts
• Faster installation of 3rd party applications
• Fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes for users with lots of third party applications
• Improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display
• Repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages
• Option to wipe data after ten failed passcode attempts