The calamitous launch, at least in the UK, of the iPhone 3G in July didn't ease once people actually got the gadgets in their hot hands; people soon discovered an annoying tendency to drop calls, along with woeful battery life.
Apple today though put up the 2.1 version of its iPhone software (the second software update: 2.0 was quickly followed by 2.0.1, which wasn't stellar either). For once, the release notes go further than saying "Bug fixes".
Not that much further, though. The page says it will bring, among others:
* 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
* Improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display
All of which will be very welcome, I'm sure. And there's also one other thing:
* Genius playlist creation.
Oh, yes, Genius. Which is a whole topic in itself. According to my calculations, Genius is worth $8.4 billion to Apple, once it gets enough people using it (as in, everyone with an active iTunes account). That isn't peanuts. So you can see why Apple might be quite keen to roll that software out as quickly as possible.
The faster backup has already been welcomed - rather than waiting literal hours for the iPhone to backup, people are reporting five-minute backups. That's got to be good too.
So, how's your iPhone update/backup going? And how are you liking Genius now you now it's exceedingly valuable Genius?
