All you iPhone owners out there can now upgrade your iPhone to the latest iPhone Firmware version 2.1. The update increases speed in specific areas, one of the most noticeable being adding contacts in a new mail message. Previously this took 4-5 seconds before being able to scroll your contact list, this has now been fixed and is instant.
I’ve also noticed I’m getting better reception on 3G, what fluctuated between 3 and 4 bars, is now a solid 5 bars.
Camera
The camera also seems a lot more responsive, loading faster and no lag between pressing the ‘Take Photo’ button and the picture actually being taken. This is extremely handy when trying to capture photos quickly, I’ve had a number of occasions where situations have passed me by when waiting for the camera to load.
Genius
New in this firmware is the addition of the Genius playlist. Genius allows you to create playlists of similar music based on a particular track you select. This was a new feature added in iTunes 8, Firmware 2.1 brings this feature to the iPhone.
Home screen icon placement fixed
One of the most annoying things about the iPhone was updating applications over the air from the device. First of all it was dog slow, second of all it sometimes resulted in crashes and third of all the location of the that icon was ignored. Despite spending time to distribute similar applications (social network apps, games, etc) to different home screens, when updates where done an application would simply appear at as the last icon. Thankfully this has been fixed in 2.1. Whilst the application being updated is placed in last place, this is only during the update, then it’s returned to your specified position. I’m very thankful this is fixed, I’d become so frustrated that I’d given up ordering my apps. Over the air updates are also much faster.
Update
Apple’s list of updates included in the new firmware
- Decrease in call set-up failures and dropped calls
- Significantly better battery life for most users
- Dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes
- Improved email reliability, notably fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts
- Faster installation of 3rd party applications
- Fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes for users with lots of third party applications
- Improved performance in text messaging
- Faster loading and searching of contacts
- Improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display
- Repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages
- Option to wipe data after ten failed passcode attempts
- Genius playlist creation
So far so good with Firmware 2.1, if you have a good or bad experience, please leave a comment and let us know.
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