Pre-iPhone 2.0 (remember those days), we managed to snag an early leak of the iPhone 2.0 firmware and install it on our original iPhone. We found it to be buggy, but chalked that up to the distinct possibility that the firmware wasn’t technically designed for the iPhone 2G. Now that we all have official 2.0 ROMs, is the picture any better? TUAW and Engadget Mobile and Ars aren’t so sure — and to be frank neither are we. Take a perusal through our iPhone 3G forums and you’ll find all sorts of examples of bugs and hassles. Heck, it even has our Twitter followers (find us on Twitter, here) checking out the competition!
I myself have noticed significant instability in the few minutes immediately following either installing or deleting an App from the on-board App Store. I’m also still pretty darn unhappy with the various lags and slowdowns in certain apps — the most egregious of which is Contact/Phone. I timed myself trying to make a call to somebody not on my favorites list yesterday. Out of 900 contacts, it took me around 25 seconds to get the call placed. Anything more than, say, 5 is pretty much unacceptable to me.
The fine folks at iphone-dev want to make it clear: they’ve jailbroken the iPhone and they have the video above to prove it. Now all we need is a release announcement …and maybe confirmation that it will work on that rumored 2.01 release. On the first score, they let us know they’re hard at work. They must be — it’s clearly fried their taste in music — check the video above out for proof of both.
Could last Friday have been any more massive for Apple? Following on the heels of slew of preparatory updates including OS X 10.5.4 and iTunes 7.7, the transition from .Mac to Mobile Me, and — oh, yeah — the highly anticipated launch of the iPhone 3G hardware (see Dieter’s review), Apple also dropped a little something called the 2.0 firmware. Available pre-baked in the new iPhone 3G, Apple didn’t spare the love for owners of the original iPhone 2G who receive it as well as a FREE downloadable upgrade, as do owners of the iPod Touch (minus the phone, camera, SMS, and GPS functionality, and the FREE part — $10 please).
The 2.0 firmware was first demonstrated back at the Apple iPhone SDK Roadmap event in March 2008 and immediately went through a very long, very public beta process where almost anyone could sign up and download it. In spite of the NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement), during the 8 different betas released to developers, many new features that weren’t originally demonstrated still leaked out all of the interwebs. But did all of them?
Here at TiPb, we’ve all had bugs with the leaked 2.0 update and, like the rest of the interw00ts, we’re also not getting Mobile Me working reliably since it went live yesterday. Thankfully, Apple has fessed up and admitted that the transition from .Mac has “taken longer than expected” (per Engadget).
The Mobile Me desktop login just worked for me for the first time just now, this morning. I’m successfully pushing data out, but I’m not about to start depending on it for real work. Is it working for you?
Those of us who went ahead and downloaded the iPhone 2.0 Firmware Update direct from Apple may have jumped the gun a little too early. There have been some problems with it — I myself have had a handful of crashes and, yes, a couple of full-on resets. A couple of times these crashes (and one of the reset) happened in the Phone App. The Phone app should be the most SOLID application on the device, so seeing it freeze up and make me drop a call (and wait for a reboot) was disheartening to say the least.
Looks like I’m not alone, though Engadget notes that they’ve been having some problems too and posits that maybe, just maybe, the firmware we downloaded was technically meant for the iPhone 3G and not the current-gen. If so, that would explain a lot, especially in the Phone app, which I imagine needs some pretty exact radio information in order to work properly.
Let’s hope that when the official release comes via iTunes, these bugs will disappear, because otherwise it’s going to be pretty tough to call people and brag about my iPhone 3G tomorrow when it’s resetting on me.
How ’bout y’all? Did you download? Is it holding up?
Note: since this is a separate file, make sure you’re backed up to iTunes before you start, this full update will erase all your data and you’ll need to have your data backed up in order to restore afterwards.
In order to install the firmware, you will have to do it manually by pressing the Option key when pressing the “Check for Update” button in iTunes. Then select the .ipsw file manually. If for some reason your download is a “.zip” file, rename it to “.ipsw” before proceeding.
The hits just keep on coming this morning. Next up, TUAW noticed a few new downloads on Apple.com - specifically they’re iPhone configuration utilities that look to be the perfect tool (until there’s OTA setup) for administrators in companies that have deployed iPhones. There’s a web utility for both Mac and Windows and also a more powerful Mac utility. The basic idea here is you set up a simple file (just XML) with certain settings like:
security policies, VPN configuration information, Wi-Fi settings, APN settings, Exchange account settings, mail settings, and certificates
…then you just load the file onto an iPhone and voila, the darn thing is all set up for business. You can head over to http://www.apple.com/support/iphone/enterprise/ for full instructions on how to use the tools.
Use the breadcrumbs at the top go get to the app store .
OMGAPPZ!
Check out the gallery after the break for some of the stuff we’re browsing for — including a free AOL App, a free iTunes Remote App (YES), and more! What are you downloading? Let us know in the forums or — even better — chat it up in our forums.
With the second coming of the iPhone at our doorsteps (3G for those of you living in a cave), there has been an intriguing amount of comparison between the “old” iPhone 2G and the shiny new 3G Wonder. The coming of 2.0 and the App Store has everyone a-twitter, but lest we forget, there are still a plethora of web-based apps out there that are just darn good and useful. This week’s Tip, courtesy of Fiona King and currencytrading.net (a BIG thanks, Fiona!), is all about helpful financial apps for the iPhone. Read on, friends!
Among the features we’d hoped to see in iPhone 2.0 that we didn’t: Photo Speed Dial. Sure, there’s a nasty hack to get photo speed dial by adding web shortcuts to your homescreen, but it’s not very convenient and the photos are very small. TechAU managed to have one of those moment where they think of something that we all should have: Contact Coverflow. We like it because, well, the Coverflow framework is already on the iPhone (you’ve seen it in the iPod app) and can be utilized by other jailbroken apps — as witnessed in the jailbreak app AppFlow.
We wish we’d thought of this first. Actually, we wish Apple had thought of this first. iPhone 2.1 anybody?
The iPhone Blog merged with the Phone different site in May of 2008. Both sites were founded on a premise that comes one from one of Apple's old slogans: Think different. The iPhone Blog: for people who dare to phone different.
