The iPhone 2.1 software update works very well, and you should download it immediately if you are using an Apple iPhone 3G. This is the big fix we've been waiting for; the one that Steve Jobs promised at the "Let's Rock" event Apple held here in San Francisco earlier this week. Apple promised a fix for reception issues, reliability concerns and battery life, the holy trinity of the cell phone game. The good news is that after only a few hours with the iPhone 2.1 software installed on our iPhone 3G, we can say that the new release seems to deliver.
Pages load much, much faster, and 3G reception seems greatly improved. Our Apple iPhone 3G has remained a steady 1-2 bars ahead of our AT&T Tilt, on the same 3G network, here in San Francisco. Pages that used to stall before loading now seem to spring open much more quickly. We tested the iPhone 2.1 software on AT&T's network against the iPod touch in Wi-Fi mode and the iPhone was never more than a few seconds behind the iPod, usually taking about 10 seconds longer or less to open the same Web page. Against the AT&T Tilt, Safari is a much faster browser than Internet Explorer, so our results have always been better on the iPhone.
We've also experience no application crashes since we updated to the iPhone 2.1 software. Super Monkey Ball, which used to crash often, hasn't blacked out our device in more than a dozen tries opening and quitting the app. Even better, the App store on our phone and our laptop seem more in sync, both reporting the correct number and type of application updates available, for the first time ever.
We're still testing battery life after the iPhone 2.1 software update, so we'll have to update later with our complete results, but if the only improvements were in the dramatic reception and network speed improvements we've already seen, for that alone we would have been thankful. Of course, we're still holding out for copy and paste capabilities, and maybe some Flash in the browser, but we'll have to hold out for future updates before we get ahead of ourselves. At least now that some significant problems have been fixed, we're more confident recommending the iPhone 3G and looking ahead to the future for the platform.
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