iPhone 2.0.2 software update

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	Home / Cell phones / Multimedia smartphones

	iPhone 2.0.2 software update	By Philip Berne, 19 August 2008

GALLERY

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We test drive the new iPhone 2.0.2 software update for the Apple iPhone 3G. Did it fix the problems we were having?

Apple has released the new iPhone 2.0.2 software update, for their iconic phone. We had been having some problems with our Apple iPhone 3G, and though the original software update fixed some of the bugs we had encountered with third-party apps on the iPhone, there were still significant problems that needed attending. Now, the iPhone 2.0.2 software update has arrived with no real details about what it will address beyond "Bug Fixes".

Among these enigmatic "Bug Fixes", problems with the iPhone 3G's reception were apparently not addressed. To determine if the iPhone 3G was seeing better data reception, we tested the phone against an AT&T Tilt, running on the same HSDPA network in lower Manhattan. Both phones showed nearly identical reception, a fairly unimpressive 2-3 bars at most, dipping to a single bar on both phones at various points. On both phones we loaded our own homepage, infoSyncWorld.com, which is one of our favorite test pages not only because we're egomaniacs, but also because it involves a ton of pictures and text to load.

During our first test, both pages started to load, but the AT&T Tilt found our advertiser's interstitial ad, instead of our page. We clicked through the ad and loaded our homepage. Even with this long delay, the AT&T Tilt beat the iPhone 3G hands-down. We repeated the test with the New York Times page, and even Google's simple page. In all tests, the Tilt came out far ahead.

We could attribute some of this speed difference to the browsers. The Tilt was using Internet Explorer, which is a much older browser. The pages it loads are complete, but the layout is poor and pages come out looking chopped up. Safari is a much newer browser, and it renders pages that look almost exactly as they do on the desktop.

Otherwise, we notice nothing extraordinary about the iPhone 2.0.2 software update. The phone still has abysmal battery life, and will run out on us half way through a day of normal use. Our contacts list will still take up to 10 seconds or more to open, a far cry from the instant contact searching on Windows Mobile phones. Furthermore, we're still having problems with all of our mail connections, and the data connection on the whole seems unreliable. We've become more accustomed to our iPhone's 3G connection failing on us than working for us.

Petty annoyances also remain. There are still discrepancies between the iPhone App Store on our device, and the App Store on iTunes, in terms of which software needs to be updated. When the software is updated, the iPhone still curiously forces the icons for updated Apps to whichever page on your iPhone's home screen has an empty slot, instead of leaving them be.

In other words, this isn't the release we've all been hoping for. We'll keep trying, and hope that Apple has a magic wand it can wave over all these issues, but as we get further and further from the Apple iPhone 3G's launch, we're doubting this more and more.