iPhone 3.0 - born on schedule...
Apple's iPhone 3.0 Software update went live Wednesday at around 10:00 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time. After a few hours of reviewing its flagship features, I can report that all - well, most - seems to be in order. After a half-hour download of its 230.1MB bulk over a sputtering DSL connection, I fired up the installation process. …
After it installed OS 3.0, it gave me an "unknown error" error, and had to go into recovery mode. Recovery would only try reinstalling OS 3.0, which of course failed with the same error.
So now I'm without my shiny JesusPhone. Good thing I have some spare GSM phones rattling around, which frankly were better at a lot of things anyway. I might just switch back for a while.
.... Shake the phone and the undo menu appears. I dunno if this works in all apps butout seems to be included in most.
"I found myself searching for the Undo button. Couldn't find one."
Try shaking it, in an Etch-A-Sketch stylee.
...all good here. Liking the new options - nice one Apple.
As the title, the camera app is missing an icon to open the previously saved pictures
Well mine crapped out and crashed out iTunes 8.2 on my Mac OS X 10.5.7 -- which was pretty annoying. The phone would only let me make emergency calls and had a picture of a USB cable and an iPhone so I unplugged it and plugged it in again, after relaunching iTunes and all was fine as it worked (finally).
All go so far, wish Spotlight would stop rummaging through my bins; I've only recently managed to stop it doing the same on my Mac.
MMS, sent a test one to a mate with iPhone and 3.0 software; he received mine but I got back one of the text messages from O2 that you get when you receive an MMS and your phone can't handle it. So, something not quite right there.
Voice Recorder, I need to hold phone next to my mouth for sound to be recorded at anything above 'barely inaudible'; but that could be user error.
Why can't all software upgrades be this simple.
Interesting that the first sync after the upgrade took an age to do the backup.
Great to see landscape emails. Much easier to read these useless HTML emails that many companies insist on sending.
Well chuffed. A great device that's maturing nicely and is so much better for this upgrade.
And why can't Microsoft create the same amount of positive feelings for their devices?
Borked my installation and took ages to restore. Then the authentication servers failed for some time to reactivate
Don't fret about a shaky dsl connection either, hefty connection here but speed was limited to about 150Kbps. And MMS isn't working properly in UK either - O2 appear to be struggling to apply the new settings. Can send ok, but receiving results in the "you have received a media message, go here to see it"
Copy and paste is clunky. Shake to shuffle was switched off by me in seconds.
So far, an anticlimax
For an update that people have been banging on about for months, and that people were almost suicidal when it seemed to be delayed by a day, I am incredibly unimpressed. I remain a firm Blackberry user, though I carry both an 8900 and an iPhone and have been generally unimpressed with the iPhone in general, but this update seems to contain....nothing? Cut and paste is bloody awful on the touch screen with fingers of an adult size, no-one uses MMS anymore - at least not in my circle, email is free, and tethering? At £15 per month? No thanks.
All style, no substance (hence PH)
I wonder if that works for other things. You know, like when you're talking about someone and they walk up behind you without you realising... or when you're reading el reg on the iPhone, and accidently click through to some of Ted Dziuba's expletive laden tripe, you could just shake your way out of there?
Surprised you've not noticed a speed up in Safari. The difference is very visible to me. In fact the whole phone is quite a bit snappier. As for the new features not working in some of the apps you've got: if they've not been updated to be 3.0 compatible, then what do you expect? I've only had a few apps update and they work fine. Can't check if there's more as I can't connect o iTunes at the moment. It's been bombed with the load in the UK.
A mate joined me in the pub having just updated.
He finally figures out how to copy. But paste? Took him 10 minutes to realise how - not between apps. Makes sense, when you can only run one app at a time I suppose.
I whipped out my Touch HD - inferior in many ways I admit - but still copy/pasted instantly between 4 apps for the sake of it.
And then ran TomTom, because I can.
While Google Maps probably reported my location in the meantime over Latitude - I don't know for sure, sorry, it runs in the background, along with other stuff I forget about, but which is useful to have running, so much so that I don't care, it's like a proper "computer" like, like.
Deserved flame retardant iNorak on.
Probably there is a reason that you are an anonymous coward.
You may be a coward, but your mate must be an idiot.
It took me under thirty seconds to work out how to cut and paste, working simply off trial and error. And it's working between apps.
I suppose you /were/ in the pub, with all that implies.
Paris, because she's smarter than you.
Give it a quick shake for the undo function. This isn't blatantly obvious and it would have been better to have a button though.
Downloaded and installed quick enough, no problems except for activation with a pin locked sim card is not possible, so you have to unlock, disconnect, then reconnect before it will will work. Why should I have to reactivate anyway though? Does that mean that if I go somewhere else after my contract is up it won't activate when I next update it?
Strangely enough my Dutch iPhone went from English back to Dutch after the update until I activated it when it remembered the correct language. Odd.
Love the interface for the recorder. Someone though about how to make it interesting (like flicking the mic gives a noise like flicking the mic, but flicking the area around the mic give nothing). Useless, but gives a nice feel to the app anyway :)
'no folder in camera'...
I though that - but it's not what you think - try taking a picture and see what happens...
@fluffy: I got lots of 'unknown errors' when I did my upgrade. It kept failing when trying to connect to iTunes so I assumed it was down to server load. But then I ejected the phone, closed and re-opened iTunes and then reconnected the phone...and it re-activated first time, so try that.
@Matt 40: There's no pictures icon in the camera app because it now displays a thumbnail of the last photo you took. Take a random snap and you'll see.
MMS still doesn't seem to work properly. I still have a random snap waiting to be sent. Rummaging through the settings I see that O2 have changed the APN name for all the iPhone services. It used to be 'mobile.o2.co.uk' but now there are multiple APNs (for data, MMS and visual voicemail) and they are all set to 'idata.o2.co.uk'. Now I wonder why O2 would want to separate/differentiate iPhone traffic in this way...
All in all...I'm not impressed. The extra features just don't really do it for me although I'm cried for want of cut-and-paste in the past so I'm sure that will come in useful. But Safari is now slower and clunkier, even typing text into an input box is laggier than it used to be.
There's no revert option that I can find. And we call it progress.
shaking to undo isn't a poor UI to anyone who's ever had an etch a sketch
A Blackberry user "unimpressed". Oh deary me. Lets all burn our iPhones then, because that is all that matters, impressing the Blackberry crowd!
Geez, okay, we get it, Apple cannot do anything right in your eyes. You've proven your point.
Returning back to the real world - the iPhone firmware update 3.0 is a welcome set of changes and improvements. It brings the iPhone closer to matching the spec of the vast majority of so-called Smartphones and others, doing the simple stuff in Messaging like MMS and SMS forwarding. It is a joy to be able to re-join the viral SMS joke distribution that we all enjoy from time to time.
The new firmware works as described on the tin - and faultlessly as far as I have been able to witness so far. The Apple developers seem to have worked quite hard to get this one right. And all the bitching and moaning about any broken apps (i.e. Facebook camera is borked) are unjustified in being directed at Apple. The app developers have had months to make sure their apps were 3.0 compliant - shame on those that simply haven't bothered yet.
Cut and Paste are a complete doddle, and something of a welcome addition - it is useful being able to C&P between the apps that it works for. I was able to use it usefully to pop info from an SMS into a Calendar entry as a reminder - something I seem to need to do quite often in my life! I can't see the fuss, it is fairly intuitive as is the rest of the iPhone paradigm.
iPhone firmware 3.0 should silence many of the critics, but I forecast that it won't. But the less rabid out there in the real world are likely to find that this new release will fill in pretty much all the holes and deficiencies that they worked under in pre-3.0 firmwares for this device.
Well done Apple. This is a nice and rich update to an OS that was beginning to feel very dated.
Good update, pretty well pleased. Apart from some lengthy sync backups, all is well.
@Matt 40: There isn't a folder missing - It's just that it now shows a thumb of your last camera snap. If you haven't taken one since the update, then it's blank until you do.
So, you were running this on a TouchHD, running WinMo? So presumably while he spent 15 minutes working out how to use cut and paste, you had plenty of time for the 3 required soft-resets because MS's OS is so shonky?
Oh, and before you flame, I'm an Android owner who's left WinMo because after 4 years I finally had enough of the PoS WinMo which needs a stylus or sharp nails to do anything, and means I miss calls regularly because the OS takes 45 seconds to reschedule the CPU with enough cycles to allow me to answer the phone.
All mobile OS'es have there foibles - Android is by no means perfect either. Guess you takes your pick and makes your choice. In some respects I wish I'd bought an iPhone instead of a Magic, but where would be the fun if everything 'just worked'? (and besides, I know the iPhone has its fair share of annoyances..).
Paris: 'Cos even she knows that WinMo is at the bottom of the pile when it comes to mobile OSes.
Updated to 3.0 the other day and the first thing I noticed is how much slower 3rd party apps run than they used to, very clunky :(
Copy and paste is unintuitive and messy (takes too long to pop up the copy/paste buttons too), voice app is pointless and the search function needs to be able to ignore trashed items and search within 3rd party apps, tho i suppose that may have to rely on them to update.
El reg needs to have a "meh" icon...
So have Apple finally worked out that travelling with an Iphone is a pain in the @ss. Roam overseas and you can't limit the size of each email that it downloads (you can only turn roaming off altogether). I assume 3.0 has not added any configuration for this? At least Windows Mobile lets you configure "only download x lines of each email message". It is easy to spend $50-$100 a time just updating your inbox.
Apple still have some way to go for the Iphone to be a true corporate offering.
Happy with the update but it wouldn't authenticate at all yesterday so I had to do it at 6.am uk time. Lots of chatter about that on support forums and no doubt some muppets buggered their phones up trying to work around it. So not 100% success for Apple, but still well done.
Roll on DOOM!
You are right mate. The iBling is just catching up with normal phones and the luddites need a little time to adjust.
Evil Jobs - cos he's a wanker.
was the big nightmare for me, for some reason the upgrade forces a re-activation of the phone, and, true to form, the activation servers dropped a bollock with everyone trying to activate at the same time*.
Unfortunately this left a phone that i couldn;t access and could only use to make emergency calls until they sorted it out.
*This seems strangely familiar somehow.
A colleague's phone borked yesterday and has to go back to the shop (it committed suicide to the point that Windows only saw a USB device, not an iPhone), mine went OK but I had to break and reconnect so that I could enter the SIM PIN number.
And it added to blank pages in the apps so for a moment I thought I'd lost 70% due to incompatibility. Undocumented Hitchcock feature, I guess..
BTW, not sure if it's in the docs, but it now also has a top icon (like for WiFi) when you have the phone on divert. For me, that alone was worth the hassle. Still divided on whether I ought to buy my own. Mine's company supplied for support reasons - sales staff all have one - but I'm still not sure it's worth the dosh. Not a big Apple fan, nor all that impressed by the iPhony - more thinking about LG, or HTC.
Apart from a crap user interface, my favourite hardware format remains the Motorola V3i, dumb as it was. Small, discrete, just whoever came up with that address book needed to go back to UI school.
Anyway, I digress. It appears to work :-).
o2 Customers - To receive pictures (MMS) you must text MMS to 1010.
Hope this helps folks.
Watch out RIM, Symbian and Android... Apple are now only 2 years or so behind you with their "new" features!
(gets coat, puts HTC Magic in pocket, wanders off wondering what all the fuss is about!)
Once again, I am reading a smartphone software review which doesn't show me the landscape keyboard, a fundamental requirement for any person with everso-slightly larger fingers than usual and uses their device for email and text messaging predominantly..
Here, I'll spend a little time on it for you: http://www.fonearena.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/iphone_30_email_landscape_keyboard.png
Looks plenty big enough to me, even if some text space above is lacking. Is it easy to type on?
Downloaded fine. But when it finished couldn't connect to Itunes for hours to finish the update process. Took about 3 hours all told to sort it self out. Very fustrating.
The error message, something like "Timed out while trying to connect to Itunes store - check your connection and try again." Strangley I could connect to Itunes and download other things.
I kind of feel like its a windows update. Sure its faster and better now, but what a pain getting it installed. Why do I have to reboot so many times...
We just had a call from our phone shop - apparently there's a message going to all shops to stop people upgrading where possible. It appears certain versions of firmware will brick instead of update. As that happened in our office as well I can only confirm - and piss those people off by demonstrating the new features as mine went fine (evil grin).
The update process fails and leaves you with a phone that is only just about recognised as a USB device.
So, iUpdate or iNuke - do you feel lucky, punk?
... I'm not fussed about what it does for the jesus-phone - how much of this is applicable to the Touch? Specifically as US$10 would be a reasonable cost for being able to cut n' paste a humping great WPA2 key rather than having to type it in (especially as the key entry seems to have problems showing lower case rather than upper case all the time - which makes double checking keying difficult)
I kind of agree with the author though that shake to undo isn't the most self-evident (a rare UI screwup for Cupertino perhaps), although I'll grant that there's a certain logic once you know about it.
Maybe Apple should launch a _free_ Etch-a-sketch simulator to get folks used to the new feature? ;)
signed, iPodVictim
don't know whether it's because i'm using IMAP, but spotlight only seems to search email titles. Pretty lame, if you ask me. Plus, some sort of preview in the search results is necessary, as otherwise checking each result by opening and closing Maill every time is a right ballsache.
A 300 meg down load and the best yu get is 'copy / paste' !!!
And you're happy with it! Astonishing.
Mind you, at least it starting to get to a point where the I 'Phone is now merely average, rather than simply poor.
Nokia's have been doing 'copy / paste' for ooh, eight, ten years perhaps. I think my 6110 [little silvery thing with a mono screen] could do that way back when.....
P.
Wow. How long did it take you to make that bollocks up? So what you are trying to tell me is that your Touch is better that my iPhone? You are wrong. I owned a HTC Touch. It was shit. Anything that requires a stylus to operate is shit. Great, so the music player an photo manager have a 'touch' interface. Sort of. Well not really.
On the iPhone, copy and paste is implemented brilliantly and works really well between apps, extremely intuative, as is the 'etch-a-sketch' like undo mechanism (why can't journalists admit it when they made a mistake?). I've never had a problem with location services, a go to http://iphone.tomtom.com/iphone.html for more info on TomTom for iPhone. Signal strength is better than the Touch too. As for 'multitasking' (obviously this is to be the new no copy & paste/mms bête noir of the Nokia/WinMo fanboi's), answer me this. If you can only do one thing at a time on a device, why allow it to run multiple apps that slow it down and drain power? If an app needs to chug away in the back ground, I'd argue that it's been poorly written! This is not a design flaw as many of you try and point out, but a consious design decision. Instead, they have designed a push notification system that, after an admittedly shaky start, is working really well, with the benefits yet to be fully realised by the developer community.
Ultimately, the reason why WinMo fails is due to it trying to be a mobile computer, rather than being a PDA. It one of the reasons why it didn't take off *as* a PDA. The iPhone may not tick all of your feature bloat, sorry, boxes ticked, but it doesn't need to. It does what it does really well, certainly better than the two HTC devices that I have owned - build quality is an order of magnitude greater on the iPhone too. Generally, if there is a missing feature you'll find that there's an app for that. Lots of them a free too.
How much are much are Microsoft paying you astroturfers these days? They must be scraping the barrel a bit these days though. It would appear that you can't be bothered to find a spec sheet so you can tell me what features are 'better' implemented in Windows Mobile.
It all seemed to go pretty seamlessly early this morning (thus avoiding yesterday's server hammering). Though oddly my iPod seemed to think it was French. Fortunately, I can remember enough schoolboy French to find the language options in Settings. Feck knows what I would have done if it had defaulted to Turkish, or something.
Spotlight is good. Cut'n'paste I worked out in about 10 secs (though I wasn't in a pub). The iPod seems snappier, but that may just be down to the effective restore (i.e., if I'd restored my 2.1 install, I'd have noticed the same speed increase). Fortunately, I'd spotted the autofill settings before launching Safari (Settings is always the first place I start after an update).
A couple of nice new features in the iPod app -- Podcasts now have their own shortcut options. No more Genius button (no use for Podcasts), now there's an instant 30 sec rewind, and a button to change the voice speed (1x, 2x, 0.5x). Quite handy. Another nice feature is the scrubbing speed can be changed by moving your thumb up and down the screen after selecting the scrubbing bar. Handy on those very short or very long tracks.
One slightly worrying thing is that my battery seems to being eaten at a frightening rate. On a 2hr Tube/train ride to my client, I seem to have consumed about 50%... I'm hoping a reset will sort it out (it has previously).
Finally, it's really small, but I like the fact that the iPod now jumps to the playing song in a playlist when I click the back button. It was always a pain to have to scroll through the list to see what song was coming up!
All in all, nothing major, but assuming I can get the battery issue sorted, the update was worth it just for the Safari autofill (thanks to unmemorable hotspot usernames and passwords!).
...where's that Flash plugin? Done but not allowed in appstore, or just not done?
Adobe? Apple? Hello?
Doesn't seem to work within text messages.
As I've got an original 2G phone, I'm also missing out on MMS, video and voice controls.
I wish o2 would give more information on the upgrade path and costs, or are there no deals/savings for those of us upgrading?
You complain when there's no cut and paste then complain when it's not that easy to use?
It's not an easy feature to implement in the iPhone OS with it's low button count.
I've tried pulling down podcasts via 3g (this is on O2 in the UK) to be met with the familar message stating that anything over 10MB has to go via Wi-Fi.
Is anybody else seeing this as well?
Where's the app for To Do Items, synced from my Mac over MobileMe?
Why the hell can't I sync Notes on my iPhone to Notes on my Mac and vice versa? Utterly stupid having two different systems which don't talk to each other.
Why don't my subscribed calendars on my Mac sync to my iPhone over MobileMe?
Why can't I click on the location in a Calendar event and have it bring up the location in the Map??
Why can't I get preview messages for emails when the phone is locked in the same way that I do with text messages?
Why do I still have to go through that stupid system logging into O2's website with a code to view incoming picture messages? Shouldn't they just come straight to my iPhone now?
All in all, LAME.
Almost painless update process, apart from the authentication logjam. I do like the new options on podcasts and audiobooks previously mentioned. Big improvement to YouTube too, logging into your account for favourites and you can now see comments...actually, not sure if that last one's a good thing.
No one gets video unless they have the 3GS, O2 also have said on they're website for about a week now that mms is only for 3G and 3GS customers. Also in fairness to O2 they have the upgrade path on they're site under iPhone.
That aside, it all went pretty smoothly for me, upgraded as soon as iTunes would allow(6 on the dot) and 20 minutes later had a fully functioning iPhone 3g running 3.0. One small gripe however, the first time connecting after upgrade, it told me I weren't using an O2 sim and that I could basically brick my phone, a quick disconnect and shutdown of iTunes sorted that. Apart from that all seems well. Not sure what to make if it really, some cool stuff in there but smells of 'could of done better'
I also note the flamers are having a field day.
MMS wise, O2 had automatically sent me settings before I'd had a chance to fiddle with most stuff.
Peace out
Hello. We know you are waiting for MMS to be set up on your iPhone. We're sorry. We are working as fast as we can and you should be set up within a few hours.
I moved from WinMo6 to iPhone back in February and even though I found the device restrictive.... everything just works. I was really looking forward to the OS 3.0 rollout when I heard that Bluetooth support for stereo headphones would be added as I hate wires and have a pair of Jabra BT620s that I used to use with my WinMo phone. Sadly the iPhone support doesn't go so far as to include the track selection controls, but otherwise not too bad. Maybe they can add full support in the next update?
I was able to update mine. but got really fedup with the 02 MMS mess up.
I even did a restore to try and get it to work. then this morning got out of bed and it worked.
Anyways. I think it has got slower. seems to take a bit longer to notice i have pressed a "button"
I have had many phones over the years and still have a Vario 2 on t-mobile and that has WM 5 on it. and it has a real keyboard lol.
WM has been rubbish since day one. I'm no iphone fanboy but I know when something works and just about everytime the iPhone does.
I have noticed I used to have to do lots of resets on WM.
The iPhone has some problems. it does not like most of my bluetooth devices and takes what seems like an age to work with them. so times its picks them up sometimes it does not.
Also I hate it when the screen does not come on when i get a call. and that means i miss the Wife Phoning, My mistake that might be a good thing...
I really want apple to update the iPhone so we get the fastest possible speed from the 600+ cpu
I have to charge mine a few times a day as it is, so it would not make that much diff to me. or have a CPU speed control for people that need phone battery life over fuction sometimes.
The iPhone may not be the best phone in most people eyes but it does work and in most cases is stable. to me that makes it worth more as I can use the phone when i want to and it work...
Paris even she is not that Dumb to use Windows Mobile OS
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