Firmware 2.1 Beta Seeded, Hints at New Features

by Eric March on July 25, 2008 at 11:27 am

Apple has seeded the first beta of the next firmware update to developers, dubbed version 2.1. (Not to be confused with the alleged 2.0.1 bug fix release that’s also been rumoured.) Already there has been a preliminary dissection, and there appear to be tantalizing clues to thinks we may end up seeing.

To begin with, new Core Location hooks have been spotted. The suggestion is that the new hooks include tracking for direction and speed, two required components of proper GPS navigation, including turn-by-turn directions — though whether that’s going to be included is pure speculation at this point.

Another interesting thing that was rooted out from the new beta is a new version of the WebKit framework, within which exist commands for plugins, copy, paste, and cut, among a few others. Although that sounds like we might finally get copy & paste, don’t get too excited yet; there’s no word yet on whether these are just superfluous holdovers from the desktop version, so let’s play wait and see with this.

Finally, one last thing finally making its appearance in 2.1 is Apple’s Push Notification Service. You know, that means by which apps are supposed to be able to send you notifications without needing to run in the background — the service that was supposed to be live at launch? Yeah. It may finally see the light of day.

Still mostly speculation here, so we’re going to have to wait this one out and see which ones bear fruit.

(via Engadget)

One Response to “Firmware 2.1 Beta Seeded, Hints at New Features”

iPod Touched » Blog Archive said:

July 26th, 2008 at 10:37 am

[...] Here’s a screenshot of 2.1 running on an unlocked iPhone 1G. Pwnage remains in effect. Unlike all other jailbreaks (and unlocks for 1G), we believe Pwnage to be fixable only via a hardware revision. So far Pwnage has worked for 1.1.4, all eight (!) 2.0 betas, 2.0 itself, and now 2.1 beta1.” [...]