iPhone 3.0 - born on schedule...
...and (mostly) healthy
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Lightning Review 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. Thirteen minutes later, my iPhone 3G was upgraded and its free space had shrunk marginally from 614MB to 605MB.
After my iPhone self-started, I took a trip through Settings, where I discovered a few changes. As widely expected, enhanced parental controls in Settings > General > Restrictions now provide finer-grained control over what Junior can download from both iTunes and the App Store - although a quick survey of the App Store shows that a majority of developers have not yet age-tagged their apps, as Apple's iPhone software chieftain Scott Forrestall asked them to do during the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote last Monday in San Francisco.
iPhone 2.2.1 (left) had blunt-instrument restrictions; iPhone3.0 (right) is more refined
Interestingly, my first trip to Settings > General > About showed that I had zero songs and zero videos on my iPhone - and there had been plenty there before I upgraded. I launched the iPod app to check whether they had, indeed, evaporated, but they were still there. I then went back to About, and the songs and videos were now correctly enumerated. By the way, there's also a new line in About that tells you how many apps you have installed.
The addition of the new Voice Memo app - more on that later - to the first home screen caused a bit of a pain in the butt by moving one of my previous first-screen apps to a new second screen, all by its lonesome. Simply moving that bumped app to the third screen, however, caused the second thus-emptied screen to disappear.
The promised Spotlight search - accessed by swiping left from the first home screen - finds text strings in Notes, Mail, Contacts, Calendar; iPod-tune artists, song, and album names; and more - although you can narrow the areas searched in Settings > General > Home > Search Results. A tap on a document listed in the search results launches the app and opens the doc. Be forewarned, though, that the search includes Mail's Trash. If you haven't cleaned yours out in a while, you will now.
Notes, messages, contacts, events, tunes - it's all searchable
In addition, Spotlight conveniently find apps by name and launches them with a tap on their icon - a blessing to geeks like me with around 100 apps.
But Spotlight doesn't find text in documents created by third-party apps - I tested Hog Bay Software's WriteRoom (iTunes links throughout) and ShapeWriter Inc.'s ShapeWriter Pro, and no dice.
The much-ballyhooed cut-copy-paste abilities do indeed work in some third-party text-entry applications - cut-copy-paste worked just fine in WriteRoom but not in ShapeWriter.
Text from Mail can be pasted into WriteRoom - and vice-versa
However, I found cut-copy-paste to be a finicky, touch-and-go affair. Admittedly, I'm as ham-handed as they come, but after an errant deletion or two, I found myself searching for the Undo button. Couldn't find one. [UPDATE 3:45 PDT: A number of readers have pointed out that an Undo dialog can be invoked by shaking the iPhone. So it can - but that's a dumb UI, IMHO.—RM]
And although cut-copy-paste worked just peachy in Safari, I wish it also worked in apps that simply present rather than edit information - but, alas, I was unable to cut-and-paste Sammy Sosa's steroid-infused 2003 stats from Bulbous Ventures' Baseball Statistics into an email to baseball commissioner Bud Selig.
Even when zoomed in, cut-copy-paste works well in Safari
COMMENTS
Borked for ages on me.
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...
@All the Pissy People posting
Get a life, you aren't all that interesting nor as important as you think you are. Put down the mouse or most likely the xbox controller, open the door and go out and take a walk in the real world for a change.
@Chris 72
I can't be bothered. Calling me a liar, saying that *I'm* hiding behind anonymity, Chris 72? Pathetic. My Tytn (SVP M3100 - actually made worse with Orange "customisations") with it's pesristent memory was a pile of junk , both in terms of build quality AND operation. That was my experience. Yours has obviously been better. Well done you. Do you want a fucking medal? All camera phones are shit - yes, even the LG's. Why? Simple physics. It seem that whatever is done to, added to, or even *invented for* the iPhone won't be good enough. I stand by everything I said - especially YOUR blinkered views towards Apple products. Your whole tirade was about using the best tool for the job - so long as it isn't Apple. Your loss.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Top 10 SIEM implementer’s checklist
Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
