Another Apple Product Out of Beta, iPhone 2.1
The iPhone 2.1 firmware upgrade is a must download for all users. There is a nice summary of added features which can be found here. I’m not going to go through each, you can see for yourself. My favorite being the contact search fix.
Playing around with version 2.1 firmware, most of the nice touches and performance issues have been cleared away. Slow contact search, crashing apps, text message keyboard lag, and many other annoying elements that made the touch experience not a pleasant one. When things lag, it feels like your rubbing on a piece of glass and not a touch device. Although things are not perfect at the moment, they have definitely increased speed significantly and added some nice UI features. Although this feels like this should have been the original 2.0 upgrade.
We have had the iPhone 2.0 for 3 months as beta testers. Sound familiar? This is an Apple trend. Apple’s software always has lagged behind their hardware. I think Apple has done a great job of meeting deadlines with SDK and iPhone 2.0 firmware, but they did bring out a buggy and slow product. Lets see what happens in the future with other releases and how beta they are. At some point it will be expected of Apple products and people just won’t by them at initial launch. Will that be likely? Probably not, if you thought the lines were bad last 3g release, expect worse in the next version.
