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iPhone OS 3.0
After nearly a week with the new OS, I am ready to share my thoughts on Apple's latest operating system for the iPhone.
Before I start any confusion, I should state that I upgraded my iPhone 3G to iPhone OS 3.0; I did NOT upgrade the device itself to the new iPhone 3G S, as much as I’d have liked to. The new OS was slated for release last Wednesday (the 17th). After I got done laying down the subfloor in the basement around 2 AM that morning, I went upstairs to the guest room (where my computer currently resides) to check for the update. No luck. I quickly realized that in Cupertino (the home town of Apple in California), it didn’t become the 17th until 3 AM EDT, so I watched some long overdue podcasts until 3 AM. When the update still wasn’t available after checking it for fifteen minutes, I headed to bed.
Since I work nights, I slept as late as I could to begin the transition into the work week. I made it until nearly noon; I actually had a dream that the update had come through but I was having trouble installing it. When I awoke from the dream, I could not get back to sleep; I was wondering if the update was yet available. I got up and checked, but still no update. I was hungry (as usual), so I grabbed a bowl of cereal and headed out onto the Internets to see what I could find out. Apparently everyone else was wondering where the hell the update was as well; I found several blog posts and news articles discussing the subject. A couple of tech websites I trust had estimates of between 1:00 and 3:00 PM EDT. Rather than head back to bed (which I should have done), I waited until 1 and checked again. Still no update.
At 2 PM the excitement began. 3.0 was finally available to me and I began the download right away. The download was quick; a good start to be sure. After the download, the install took less than a half hour (I had recently backed up my phone; however, others’ mileage may vary). At the end, the phone rebooted and came up with the screen indicating I should connect the phone to iTunes; this is the screen I saw a year ago when I had to activate my phone. No worries, though; I saw iTunes attempt to activate the phone. “Attempt” being the operative word, of course. iTunes soon threw an error stating that the iTunes store was not available. A rather nondescript error message, in my opinion—someone who didn’t know better might not realize that Apple’s activations servers were hosed due to all the other people trying to upgrade.
After a few attempts at activating over the Internet (via uplugging and re-plugging the phone), I looked up my blog post from a year ago where I had managed to trick iTunes into thinking it was an activation server. I found it quickly and attempted the hack. Not only did it not work, now iTunes was complaining that my phone couldn’t be connected to because it was locked with a passcode. I do keep a passcode on the phone, and normally when I get that error I wake the phone up and unlock it by typing in my code; however, with the phone only displaying the “plug me into iTunes” screen, I couldn’t unlock it to make iTunes happy. I put the phone into restore mode (by shutting the phone off and then holding the home button whilst connecting it to iTunes) and wiped it clean with a fresh install of the OS. At this point I had to leave for the gym.
Upon my return, my phone had not only been restored, it had activated. I fired up iTunes in normal mode (you can’t sync and such in activation mode) and started a restore from backup to get all my apps, media, and settings back. It took forever, but it is (as always) totally worth it. As far as my upgrade experience, I have to say I’m rather miffed that Apple still has yet to solve their activation issues; whether they switch to a rolling release (one state/timezone/whatever at a time) or turn on more servers I don’t care, but I didn’t like having to deal with that two years in a row. Speaking of which, why did I have to activate again in the first place? Inane.
Despite my frustrations with the install, I’m very happy to have 3.0. It has a number of features I’ve been wanting since I got my phone. Most of these are common knowledge and are listed on Apple’s iPhone page here. Copy and paste is a dream, more landscape keyboards are always welcome (especially in Mail, as I sometimes read mail while still in bed or with the phone on a horizontal cradle), the voice recording app is great (especially since you can trim your voice memo after recording it), and the list goes on. I’ll just highlight a few lesser-known features I’ve found.
First off, scrubbing media (dragging the “you are here” dot on the progress bar) has always been a bit klunky on the iPhone; the resolution of the screen/touch panel limited how finely you could hunt for a specific spot in a piece of media. For 3-minute songs, this is fine, but for a 1.5-hour podcast, each pixel can be a serious jump in time. With 3.0, you can now scrub with better accuracy by sliding your finger down the screen vertically once you hold down on the slider button; once you do, your horizontal movements become more precise the farther down the screen you are. While I didn’t ever think I needed such a feature, now that I have it I feel it is a necessity.
One feature I did think of was the ability to open web pages in new tabs in mobile Safari. I do this on the desktop all the time; not being able to do it on the iPhone was somewhat annoying on occasion. I actually requested this feature on Apple’s site. With 3.0, it is now here; when you hold down on a link, you not only get the full URL displayed, you can copy the URL, or—my favorite—open it in a new page/tab (whatever they’re called on the iPhone). In many cases, this means you don’t have to wait for your original page to reload when you go back to it; it also allows you to open up two or three links in separate pages without lots of typing. Another feature in Safari that I (and likely thousands of others) asked for and got was auto-fill in Safari; no more typing in usernames and passwords each time I visit a secure site.
The last feature I’d like to highlight here is subscribed calendars. The two examples I have are sports schedules and holidays; sure, you could manually enter all of these in, but why bother? With 3.0, you can subscribe to calendars. It’s simple: find your calendar (search for “iCal” or “ICS” and your subject) and copy its URL to the clipboard in iPhone. Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, & Calendars > Add account (near the top). Choose Other, then Subscribed Calendar at the bottom. Paste your link in, hit next a couple of times, and you’re good to go! Calendar will now display your new calendar entries (in a different colors, no less), and depending on the calendar, you’ll remain up-to-date. NFL team schedules can be found here; US holidays can be found here. For anything else, your favorite search engine is your friend.
The only features that the 3G and OS 3.0 are capable of that aren’t supported yet are tethering and MMS. Tethering is the act of using your phone’s Internet connection as a modem for your laptop; MMS stands for Multimedia Messaging Service and allows for text messages that contain photos, video, audio, and more. AT&T says both are coming, but there is no specific release date yet. MMS will likely be free (if you currently pay for SMS messaging), while tethering will likely cost you. More on that when it arrives. Until then, if you’re an iPhone or iPod Touch user and you haven’t upgraded, 3.0 has a lot to offer and I highly recommend you consider bumping up to the latest OS.
Posted by: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) in News and Tech News on June 23, 2009 at 11:47 PM