iPhone Firmware 2.1 & iTunes 8: Two Days Later
by Eric March on September 14, 2008 at 7:54 pm
So I’ve had a chance to give firmware 2.1’s tires a good kicking to see how it stacked up overall compared to previous versions. Overall, I’m quite happy — but not completely. While there were enough improvements to leave me relatively satisfied, there’s still one outstanding problem, and unfortunately it’s a pretty big one.
Let’s run it all down here.
- Backups: Although that first backup is still pretty slow (though still faster by 2.0x standards), subsequent backups are definitely a massive improvement. What could take between 30 minutes and 3 hours(!) has, on average, dropped below a minute, sometimes spiking to a couple of minutes if there’s a lot to do.
- App Installation and Removal: Yet again, another massive increase in speed here. Apps take only a few seconds to install, instead of two or three minutes, even for small apps. Removal is similarly quick; as I was writing this, I removed 10 apps I downloaded for my last App Store Review (and some remnants from before) via iTunes, and they were purged in under 30 seconds.
- System Performance: Things have absolutely improved here, too. I feel like I’m back on firmware 1.x where overall system responsiveness and speed are concerned. Pages flip quickly, my notepad opens without having to sit there for 15 seconds wondering what it should do next, my contacts pop up almost instantaneously, searches are quick, the keyboard is at long freakin’ last quick and responsive, and in general, everything feels nice and smooth again. And it only took them two months!
- System Stability: Vastly improved here. Very nearly none of my apps crash anymore, and they all start up just like they should. Even Expando Free, which inexplicably stopped working after trying it once now boots up just fine again. There have been a few minor glitches; I tried the “lite” version of Mocha VNC, and after its first attempt to connect, it rebooted my phone after several minutes. Reloading and reconnecting solved the problem though. (The crashing problem, that is. Nothing really helped the fact that Mocha VNC is a bit crap.) My wife’s iPhone also seemed to die a couple of times while in Mobile Safari. Still haven’t worked that one out yet, but it’s not frequent or consistent.
- Mail: This actually goes to system stability, but it’s been a major issue since day one, because I’ve never been able to get mail to work, not the app nor its settings. Any settings I change are never saved, and the mail app itself just crashes back to springboard. Well, with firmware 2.1, I’m happy to report that it still doesn’t f%&#ing work. Wait, no, I meant annoyed. Annoyed to report. Same crap as last time, precisely. Pain in the arse.
- The New 3G Icon: Yeah, ridiculously minor issue, but … I don’t like it. It’s too plain. I mean, they could have at least made some fancy logo with go-fast stripes or something. Sheesh.
- Battery Life: This is the only thing I haven’t really had a chance to test out to any great degree yet, so I haven’t really got anything to report on the claims of dramatically improved battery life. We shall see in the coming days as I use my iPhone at work.
- Better 3G Connectivity: I really can’t comment on this because I live in an area with fairly extensive and strong 3G coverage, so I get good signal strength wherever I go. I did check the numeric signal strength values before and after through field test mode and didn’t notice any change, but I did notice that the iPhone was a good bit faster connecting to the network, so I wasn’t waiting nearly as long for connections to websites or other net-aware apps to make their connections, so that’s good.
- Genius: Over to my iPod Touch for the Genius feature, and — hey, that’s actually pretty cool. While I have to question some of the choices it makes, on the whole, the dynamic playlists created with the Genius feature are actually pretty on the money. The songs it picks based supposedly on their similarity to each other do happen to be pretty similar after all; a popular 80s tune pulls out other 80s tunes in similar genres, though sometimes it’ll pull out something from the 90s or 00s that doesn’t really seem to fit. However, the good thing about Genius is that it keeps learning, so over time I suspect stuff like this will work itself out.
- iTunes 8: Yeah, the basics have already been covered. Album cover grid view, Genius sidebar, magnetosphere visualizer, yadda yadda yadda. One interesting change that I’ve noticed that doesn’t seem to have been covered is that the behaviour of app downloading and installation has reversed. Before, if you manually managed your apps, any new ones you downloaded would have to be manually checked off in the Applications pane of your device. Now, it gets checked automatically. I both like and dislike this change. I like it because I don’t have to keep track of all of the new apps I’ve downloaded to test so I can go into my apps pane later and check them off. I dislike it though because it checks the apps by default for every device, and since I have 3 of them (the Touch and two iPhone 3Gs), that means I have to go into the other two and uncheck them, so I’ve basically just traded one issue for another that ends up being twice the bother. Perhaps not so cool after all.
- Application Update Notification: Another thing I’ve noticed hasn’t been discussed yet is iTunes’ habit of not being very good at keeping track of app updates. I am happy — actually happy this time — to report that this seems to have been fixed. App updates, while checked infrequently (better to manually check from time to time), now have an accurate count of the apps that actually need updating. Updating itself, however, is still problematic. The “Download All Free Updates” button still doesn’t work, so updates have to be done one-by-one, and at the time of this writing, the 8 updates I have waiting can’t be downloaded because the server keeps timing out. One problem for another.
Overall, despite the continuing battle with the mail app, I’m actually quite happy with this upgrade. There’s still work to be done on it, but by and large Apple have managed to squash the vast majority of the nasty bugs that have plagued the 2.0x series since the beginning. Reports, however, are quite varied. Many have reported worse 3G connectivity, continuing problems with apps crashing, and other contiunuing issues, so evidently your mileage may vary. For this upgrade, chalk one more up in the win column.
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Posted in Firmware Related, iPhone 2.0, iPod Touch Related
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September 14th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
I have not had the first minutes problem with my mail.app in any of the 2.X firmware versions. And that’s the first report I have heard of that problem. Today I finally got upgraded to 2.1 and restored my back up, it took like 2 minutes and I was like holy !*&$ that was fast. Then I installed all my apps and it took a maximum of 10 minutes for all of them. I’m really impressed with those types of improvements.
September 14th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
The mail thing seems to be very hit and miss, much like most problems people have encountered. Some people have the issues, some don’t. I’m one of the unfortunates that has the mail problem — though I don’t have the issues others have been reporting. I can still get on the web and check my Gmail through Safari, so it’s not like I have no access to my E-Mail, but it would be so much easier to do in the built-in mail app. I wish I knew what was causing it.
Still, I can live without mail given all of the other improvements 2.1 has brought forth. It’s nice to have an iPhone that works like an iPhone again.
September 14th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
I have heard of this mail problem before and if I recall correctly, I think I might have your solution if you have a jailbroken iphone/touch thanks to BigBoss and his BossPrefs app. Once open, tap the “More” button on the top right and then tap “Fix User Dir Permissions”, then “Fix me!”.
The information window that appears before you fix the permissions specifically mentions that itunes sometimes bugs out during a settings restore from backup and that will likely cause Mail app to crash, summerboard themes to not work, Notes app not saving, and more.
Try it out. Maybe it will work? Good luck
September 15th, 2008 at 12:24 am
Well, when planetbeing gets around to updating the latest QuickPwn for Windows I’ll definitely give it a shot. Although my notes have always worked fine, as has Winterboard. However, it doesn’t surprise me that iTunes could bugger something up — a problem I hope they’ve fixed in version 8.
Once I can jailbreak my iPhone, I’ll give that fix a try. It does make sense though that the permissions got bunged up — that explains both the crashing of the mail app and the failure to change its settings.
September 15th, 2008 at 10:04 am
But still no sync with Google Calendar? Am I the only one who wants this? I feel so lonely.
September 15th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
I never had a mail problem but safari crashes a lot while typing and the music player (ipod app) get stuck when in cover flow. It won’t rotate back.
September 15th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
And sometimes the accelerometer doesn’t work at all like in toy bot diaries
September 15th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
@Robbo - Blame Apple for the lack of third party calendar syncing. Access to the calendar is currently a no-no in the SDK rules.
@Christopher - Never had coverflow issues, and I don’t use my iPhone as an MP3 player, so can’t comment on that. As for Toy Bot Diaries though, that one’s a wee bit buggy anyway. I’ve had it crap out where I was supposed to walk on the ceiling via magnetic boots but it wouldn’t let me, making it impossible to pass a certain point. There were a few problems games had with the accelerometer on firmware 2.0x though, but that was usually programmer error. (Spinner, one of the first App Store games, had this problem.)
September 15th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
spinner worked well if you held it vertically.
September 15th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Yes, but there were times when Spinner would throw an error that it couldn’t activate the accelerometer. You had to quit and reload, sometimes more than once, before it worked. It didn’t always do it, but once in a while it had that issue. Apparently he fixed it in the second version though.
September 15th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
i have a general question on jailbreaking an ipod touch… i am completely new to the concept of jailbreaking and am pretty fuzzy on the whole process. Is jailbreaking using winpwn as easy as it seems or would a noob like me have a fairly easy time getting through it? Are there any special precautions i should be aware of before attempting to jailbreak it? Also, which method is preferred… quickpwn or winpwn?
September 15th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
@Robbo
IF you have a jailbroken iphone, go in Cydia and search for NemusSync.
Details: Sync Google Calendar with iPhone Calendar
soooooo WHY don’t people want to jailbreak? nuff said. lol
September 16th, 2008 at 12:18 am
Ryan: WinPwn is a little bit more involved It’s designed to essentially take a downloaded firmware file, insert the jailbreak into it, plus insert whatever pre-installed apps you want in it. You can then use iTunes to restore your device using the Pwned firmware you created. QuickPwn, on the other hand, while still requiring a downloaded firmware, can do everything itself, and doesn’t require a restore in iTunes, so everything you had installed and all of your settings remain intact.
QuickPwn really is the simplest jailbreak for 2.x. (It isn’t available for 2.1 yet, but planetbeing is working on it) There is a tricky bit where you need to get the timing right, but QuickPwn guides you through it.
Have a look at my QuickPwn tutorial to get all of the details and a complete walkthrough of the process from start to finish. It looks like a long article, but once you’ve downloaded the firmware, the process only takes two or three minutes from start to finish.
September 16th, 2008 at 1:54 am
one last thing. I read somewhere that quickpwn sometimes causes problems like error messages and what not. Do you know anything about general failures with quickpwn and what causes them? Also, if i had to update my ipod, would that create problems with quickpwn and would i have to somehow backup apps that i had on the ipod? Thanks a ton
September 17th, 2008 at 8:33 am
One thing I just noticed is that I updated some apps and iTunes actually deleted the version it had replaced. It had moved it to my Trash! Hopefully this means that the days of an applications directory with 10 copies of the same app are history!
September 17th, 2008 at 9:03 am
@Ryan: I haven’t really noticed QuickPwn causing any general problems with the system. It’s possible that apps you download and install from Cydia or Installer may cause certain issues if they have bugs or conflicts or are just poorly written — that’s always a risk with software on the jailbreak scene — but for the jailbreak/pwnage process itself, I haven’t experienced any problems with it so far. Updating your firmware will wipe out any jailbreak apps you have, as well as the jailbreak yourself. However, the thing about Pwnage and QuickPwn is that once you have Pwned your device once, it becomes possible to Pwn it permanently, so any time a new version of Pwnage/QiuckPwn comes out you know it’ll work. That was the original point of Pwnage: To create a system that makes sure that whatever Apple does to update the firmware, it will never close the door Pwnage opened for jailbreaking.
@Steve: This is good to hear — I hadn’t even thought about that. One other really minor little thing I’ve noticed: I usually listen to my iPod Touch on shuffle. Every night I’d dock it, and the next morning I’d get up and head to work I’d have to restart shuffle. With the latest version it will actually remember where I left off listening from the night before. Although this isn’t important for music listening for the most part, Audiobook readers should love this.
On the down side I’ve had a chance to monitor battery life for a couple of days now, and I’m disappointed to report that it hasn’t improved any, and I think it might acutally be a bit worse — though that might be because I’ve been using it a lot more while I work on my App Store Reviews at work. (No iTunes at work so I access the App Store from my iPhone.)
Speaking of that, one thing I’ve noticed — and I don’t know if it wasn’t always like this — but doing a search in the on-device App Store won’t display free apps. Only pay ones. That’s really annoying.