Thursday, June 18, 2009

iPhone Upgrade to OS 3.0

Last night I upgraded to the latest iPhone software called 3.0. This is the "catch up" version of the phone's software that is desperately needed for Apple to maintain the momentum of this technology.

The upgrade process was almost perfect - the only issue was that it changed the place of some of my icons. The placement of the icons is something you get used to very quickly so when they move (e.g., the kids playing with my iPhone) it can be very frustrating trying to find the app you use frequently. Other than this the whole upgrade process including the 230MB download took about 30 minutes unattended.

The new features are desperately required.

  • MMS- looks much easier to use that a lot of other phones I have had in the past - grade A
  • SMS - still no "forward" for use with joke SMS's. You apparently have to use copy and paste....grade C-
  • Cut Copy and Paste - works but a little clunky, you get used to it....grade C
  • Search function (swipe right) - this is an awesome new feature without an equivalent in Windows Mobile. The search looks anywhere in your iPhone for the word you enter. So any contacts, calendar appointments, applications web addresses etc are all listed and you can tap any of them to go to that entry in that application...grade A+
  • Landscape view mode in Mail and landscape keyboard - about time! Grade B only because it should have been there in the first place.
  • iPod player 30 second skip - you can now skip ahead 30 seconds at a time in the iPod which is great for listening to Podcasts....grade B for Bout time.
  • iPod player has speed setting - for podcasts I can speed up the speech. One particular podcast I listen to the bloke speaks slowly. With this feature I can double the speed of speech and still clearly understand it in half the time....grade B

There are lots more little tweaks which I will get to but all-in-all a worthy upgrade cleverly released at the same time as the iPhone 3G S so as to placate those of us that only recently purchased the iPhone 3G!

1 comment:

Grizzler said...

CORRECTION:

Forwarding an SMS is there under the EDIT option.

Not immediately obvious but there none the less.