As promised Apple released v2.1 of the iPhone firmware yesterday. I’ve upgraded mine, and so far so good. I can’t say it’s ground breaking but it doesn’t seem to have made things any worse :)
The published updates are:
• 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
In addition to those, there seem to be quite a few undocumented tweaks elsewhere. I’ve noticed an option to disable the camera functionality – possibly useful for companies that operate in secure environments, though in my experience you’re just not allowed phones there. There’s also some new icons and an extra ‘Load Earlier Messages’ button for SMS’s.
Hopefully Safari will crash a bit less, it time will tell.
Update: Here’s a useful list of the undocumented additions: Linky