iPhone 3.0 - born on schedule... Apple's iPhone 3.0 Software update went live Wednesday at around 10:00 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time. After a few hours of reviewing its flagship features, I can report that all - well, most - seems to be in order. After a half-hour download of its 230.1MB bulk over a sputtering DSL connection, I fired up the installation process …
After it installed OS 3.0, it gave me an "unknown error" error, and had to go into recovery mode. Recovery would only try reinstalling OS 3.0, which of course failed with the same error.
So now I'm without my shiny JesusPhone. Good thing I have some spare GSM phones rattling around, which frankly were better at a lot of things anyway. I might just switch back for a while.
Well mine crapped out and crashed out iTunes 8.2 on my Mac OS X 10.5.7 -- which was pretty annoying. The phone would only let me make emergency calls and had a picture of a USB cable and an iPhone so I unplugged it and plugged it in again, after relaunching iTunes and all was fine as it worked (finally).
All go so far, wish Spotlight would stop rummaging through my bins; I've only recently managed to stop it doing the same on my Mac.
MMS, sent a test one to a mate with iPhone and 3.0 software; he received mine but I got back one of the text messages from O2 that you get when you receive an MMS and your phone can't handle it. So, something not quite right there.
Voice Recorder, I need to hold phone next to my mouth for sound to be recorded at anything above 'barely inaudible'; but that could be user error.
Why can't all software upgrades be this simple.
Interesting that the first sync after the upgrade took an age to do the backup.
Great to see landscape emails. Much easier to read these useless HTML emails that many companies insist on sending.
Well chuffed. A great device that's maturing nicely and is so much better for this upgrade.
And why can't Microsoft create the same amount of positive feelings for their devices?
Borked my installation and took ages to restore. Then the authentication servers failed for some time to reactivate
Don't fret about a shaky dsl connection either, hefty connection here but speed was limited to about 150Kbps. And MMS isn't working properly in UK either - O2 appear to be struggling to apply the new settings. Can send ok, but receiving results in the "you have received a media message, go here to see it"
Copy and paste is clunky. Shake to shuffle was switched off by me in seconds.
So far, an anticlimax
For an update that people have been banging on about for months, and that people were almost suicidal when it seemed to be delayed by a day, I am incredibly unimpressed. I remain a firm Blackberry user, though I carry both an 8900 and an iPhone and have been generally unimpressed with the iPhone in general, but this update seems to contain....nothing? Cut and paste is bloody awful on the touch screen with fingers of an adult size, no-one uses MMS anymore - at least not in my circle, email is free, and tethering? At £15 per month? No thanks.
All style, no substance (hence PH)
I wonder if that works for other things. You know, like when you're talking about someone and they walk up behind you without you realising... or when you're reading el reg on the iPhone, and accidently click through to some of Ted Dziuba's expletive laden tripe, you could just shake your way out of there?
Surprised you've not noticed a speed up in Safari. The difference is very visible to me. In fact the whole phone is quite a bit snappier. As for the new features not working in some of the apps you've got: if they've not been updated to be 3.0 compatible, then what do you expect? I've only had a few apps update and they work fine. Can't check if there's more as I can't connect o iTunes at the moment. It's been bombed with the load in the UK.
A mate joined me in the pub having just updated.
He finally figures out how to copy. But paste? Took him 10 minutes to realise how - not between apps. Makes sense, when you can only run one app at a time I suppose.
I whipped out my Touch HD - inferior in many ways I admit - but still copy/pasted instantly between 4 apps for the sake of it.
And then ran TomTom, because I can.
While Google Maps probably reported my location in the meantime over Latitude - I don't know for sure, sorry, it runs in the background, along with other stuff I forget about, but which is useful to have running, so much so that I don't care, it's like a proper "computer" like, like.
Deserved flame retardant iNorak on.
You may be a coward, but your mate must be an idiot.
It took me under thirty seconds to work out how to cut and paste, working simply off trial and error. And it's working between apps.
I suppose you /were/ in the pub, with all that implies.
Paris, because she's smarter than you.
Downloaded and installed quick enough, no problems except for activation with a pin locked sim card is not possible, so you have to unlock, disconnect, then reconnect before it will will work. Why should I have to reactivate anyway though? Does that mean that if I go somewhere else after my contract is up it won't activate when I next update it?
Strangely enough my Dutch iPhone went from English back to Dutch after the update until I activated it when it remembered the correct language. Odd.
Love the interface for the recorder. Someone though about how to make it interesting (like flicking the mic gives a noise like flicking the mic, but flicking the area around the mic give nothing). Useless, but gives a nice feel to the app anyway :)
@fluffy: I got lots of 'unknown errors' when I did my upgrade. It kept failing when trying to connect to iTunes so I assumed it was down to server load. But then I ejected the phone, closed and re-opened iTunes and then reconnected the phone...and it re-activated first time, so try that.
@Matt 40: There's no pictures icon in the camera app because it now displays a thumbnail of the last photo you took. Take a random snap and you'll see.
MMS still doesn't seem to work properly. I still have a random snap waiting to be sent. Rummaging through the settings I see that O2 have changed the APN name for all the iPhone services. It used to be 'mobile.o2.co.uk' but now there are multiple APNs (for data, MMS and visual voicemail) and they are all set to 'idata.o2.co.uk'. Now I wonder why O2 would want to separate/differentiate iPhone traffic in this way...
All in all...I'm not impressed. The extra features just don't really do it for me although I'm cried for want of cut-and-paste in the past so I'm sure that will come in useful. But Safari is now slower and clunkier, even typing text into an input box is laggier than it used to be.
There's no revert option that I can find. And we call it progress.
A Blackberry user "unimpressed". Oh deary me. Lets all burn our iPhones then, because that is all that matters, impressing the Blackberry crowd!
Geez, okay, we get it, Apple cannot do anything right in your eyes. You've proven your point.
Returning back to the real world - the iPhone firmware update 3.0 is a welcome set of changes and improvements. It brings the iPhone closer to matching the spec of the vast majority of so-called Smartphones and others, doing the simple stuff in Messaging like MMS and SMS forwarding. It is a joy to be able to re-join the viral SMS joke distribution that we all enjoy from time to time.
The new firmware works as described on the tin - and faultlessly as far as I have been able to witness so far. The Apple developers seem to have worked quite hard to get this one right. And all the bitching and moaning about any broken apps (i.e. Facebook camera is borked) are unjustified in being directed at Apple. The app developers have had months to make sure their apps were 3.0 compliant - shame on those that simply haven't bothered yet.
Cut and Paste are a complete doddle, and something of a welcome addition - it is useful being able to C&P between the apps that it works for. I was able to use it usefully to pop info from an SMS into a Calendar entry as a reminder - something I seem to need to do quite often in my life! I can't see the fuss, it is fairly intuitive as is the rest of the iPhone paradigm.
iPhone firmware 3.0 should silence many of the critics, but I forecast that it won't. But the less rabid out there in the real world are likely to find that this new release will fill in pretty much all the holes and deficiencies that they worked under in pre-3.0 firmwares for this device.
Well done Apple. This is a nice and rich update to an OS that was beginning to feel very dated.
So, you were running this on a TouchHD, running WinMo? So presumably while he spent 15 minutes working out how to use cut and paste, you had plenty of time for the 3 required soft-resets because MS's OS is so shonky?
Oh, and before you flame, I'm an Android owner who's left WinMo because after 4 years I finally had enough of the PoS WinMo which needs a stylus or sharp nails to do anything, and means I miss calls regularly because the OS takes 45 seconds to reschedule the CPU with enough cycles to allow me to answer the phone.
All mobile OS'es have there foibles - Android is by no means perfect either. Guess you takes your pick and makes your choice. In some respects I wish I'd bought an iPhone instead of a Magic, but where would be the fun if everything 'just worked'? (and besides, I know the iPhone has its fair share of annoyances..).
Paris: 'Cos even she knows that WinMo is at the bottom of the pile when it comes to mobile OSes.
Updated to 3.0 the other day and the first thing I noticed is how much slower 3rd party apps run than they used to, very clunky :(
Copy and paste is unintuitive and messy (takes too long to pop up the copy/paste buttons too), voice app is pointless and the search function needs to be able to ignore trashed items and search within 3rd party apps, tho i suppose that may have to rely on them to update.
El reg needs to have a "meh" icon...
So have Apple finally worked out that travelling with an Iphone is a pain in the @ss. Roam overseas and you can't limit the size of each email that it downloads (you can only turn roaming off altogether). I assume 3.0 has not added any configuration for this? At least Windows Mobile lets you configure "only download x lines of each email message". It is easy to spend $50-$100 a time just updating your inbox.
Apple still have some way to go for the Iphone to be a true corporate offering.
Happy with the update but it wouldn't authenticate at all yesterday so I had to do it at 6.am uk time. Lots of chatter about that on support forums and no doubt some muppets buggered their phones up trying to work around it. So not 100% success for Apple, but still well done.
Roll on DOOM!
was the big nightmare for me, for some reason the upgrade forces a re-activation of the phone, and, true to form, the activation servers dropped a bollock with everyone trying to activate at the same time*.
Unfortunately this left a phone that i couldn;t access and could only use to make emergency calls until they sorted it out.
*This seems strangely familiar somehow.
A colleague's phone borked yesterday and has to go back to the shop (it committed suicide to the point that Windows only saw a USB device, not an iPhone), mine went OK but I had to break and reconnect so that I could enter the SIM PIN number.
And it added to blank pages in the apps so for a moment I thought I'd lost 70% due to incompatibility. Undocumented Hitchcock feature, I guess..
BTW, not sure if it's in the docs, but it now also has a top icon (like for WiFi) when you have the phone on divert. For me, that alone was worth the hassle. Still divided on whether I ought to buy my own. Mine's company supplied for support reasons - sales staff all have one - but I'm still not sure it's worth the dosh. Not a big Apple fan, nor all that impressed by the iPhony - more thinking about LG, or HTC.
Apart from a crap user interface, my favourite hardware format remains the Motorola V3i, dumb as it was. Small, discrete, just whoever came up with that address book needed to go back to UI school.
Anyway, I digress. It appears to work :-).
Once again, I am reading a smartphone software review which doesn't show me the landscape keyboard, a fundamental requirement for any person with everso-slightly larger fingers than usual and uses their device for email and text messaging predominantly..
Here, I'll spend a little time on it for you: http://www.fonearena.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/iphone_30_email_landscape_keyboard.png
Looks plenty big enough to me, even if some text space above is lacking. Is it easy to type on?
Downloaded fine. But when it finished couldn't connect to Itunes for hours to finish the update process. Took about 3 hours all told to sort it self out. Very fustrating.
The error message, something like "Timed out while trying to connect to Itunes store - check your connection and try again." Strangley I could connect to Itunes and download other things.
I kind of feel like its a windows update. Sure its faster and better now, but what a pain getting it installed. Why do I have to reboot so many times...
We just had a call from our phone shop - apparently there's a message going to all shops to stop people upgrading where possible. It appears certain versions of firmware will brick instead of update. As that happened in our office as well I can only confirm - and piss those people off by demonstrating the new features as mine went fine (evil grin).
The update process fails and leaves you with a phone that is only just about recognised as a USB device.
So, iUpdate or iNuke - do you feel lucky, punk?
... I'm not fussed about what it does for the jesus-phone - how much of this is applicable to the Touch? Specifically as US$10 would be a reasonable cost for being able to cut n' paste a humping great WPA2 key rather than having to type it in (especially as the key entry seems to have problems showing lower case rather than upper case all the time - which makes double checking keying difficult)
I kind of agree with the author though that shake to undo isn't the most self-evident (a rare UI screwup for Cupertino perhaps), although I'll grant that there's a certain logic once you know about it.
Maybe Apple should launch a _free_ Etch-a-sketch simulator to get folks used to the new feature? ;)
signed, iPodVictim
don't know whether it's because i'm using IMAP, but spotlight only seems to search email titles. Pretty lame, if you ask me. Plus, some sort of preview in the search results is necessary, as otherwise checking each result by opening and closing Maill every time is a right ballsache.
A 300 meg down load and the best yu get is 'copy / paste' !!!
And you're happy with it! Astonishing.
Mind you, at least it starting to get to a point where the I 'Phone is now merely average, rather than simply poor.
Nokia's have been doing 'copy / paste' for ooh, eight, ten years perhaps. I think my 6110 [little silvery thing with a mono screen] could do that way back when.....
P.
Wow. How long did it take you to make that bollocks up? So what you are trying to tell me is that your Touch is better that my iPhone? You are wrong. I owned a HTC Touch. It was shit. Anything that requires a stylus to operate is shit. Great, so the music player an photo manager have a 'touch' interface. Sort of. Well not really.
On the iPhone, copy and paste is implemented brilliantly and works really well between apps, extremely intuative, as is the 'etch-a-sketch' like undo mechanism (why can't journalists admit it when they made a mistake?). I've never had a problem with location services, a go to http://iphone.tomtom.com/iphone.html for more info on TomTom for iPhone. Signal strength is better than the Touch too. As for 'multitasking' (obviously this is to be the new no copy & paste/mms bête noir of the Nokia/WinMo fanboi's), answer me this. If you can only do one thing at a time on a device, why allow it to run multiple apps that slow it down and drain power? If an app needs to chug away in the back ground, I'd argue that it's been poorly written! This is not a design flaw as many of you try and point out, but a consious design decision. Instead, they have designed a push notification system that, after an admittedly shaky start, is working really well, with the benefits yet to be fully realised by the developer community.
Ultimately, the reason why WinMo fails is due to it trying to be a mobile computer, rather than being a PDA. It one of the reasons why it didn't take off *as* a PDA. The iPhone may not tick all of your feature bloat, sorry, boxes ticked, but it doesn't need to. It does what it does really well, certainly better than the two HTC devices that I have owned - build quality is an order of magnitude greater on the iPhone too. Generally, if there is a missing feature you'll find that there's an app for that. Lots of them a free too.
How much are much are Microsoft paying you astroturfers these days? They must be scraping the barrel a bit these days though. It would appear that you can't be bothered to find a spec sheet so you can tell me what features are 'better' implemented in Windows Mobile.
It all seemed to go pretty seamlessly early this morning (thus avoiding yesterday's server hammering). Though oddly my iPod seemed to think it was French. Fortunately, I can remember enough schoolboy French to find the language options in Settings. Feck knows what I would have done if it had defaulted to Turkish, or something.
Spotlight is good. Cut'n'paste I worked out in about 10 secs (though I wasn't in a pub). The iPod seems snappier, but that may just be down to the effective restore (i.e., if I'd restored my 2.1 install, I'd have noticed the same speed increase). Fortunately, I'd spotted the autofill settings before launching Safari (Settings is always the first place I start after an update).
A couple of nice new features in the iPod app -- Podcasts now have their own shortcut options. No more Genius button (no use for Podcasts), now there's an instant 30 sec rewind, and a button to change the voice speed (1x, 2x, 0.5x). Quite handy. Another nice feature is the scrubbing speed can be changed by moving your thumb up and down the screen after selecting the scrubbing bar. Handy on those very short or very long tracks.
One slightly worrying thing is that my battery seems to being eaten at a frightening rate. On a 2hr Tube/train ride to my client, I seem to have consumed about 50%... I'm hoping a reset will sort it out (it has previously).
Finally, it's really small, but I like the fact that the iPod now jumps to the playing song in a playlist when I click the back button. It was always a pain to have to scroll through the list to see what song was coming up!
All in all, nothing major, but assuming I can get the battery issue sorted, the update was worth it just for the Safari autofill (thanks to unmemorable hotspot usernames and passwords!).
Where's the app for To Do Items, synced from my Mac over MobileMe?
Why the hell can't I sync Notes on my iPhone to Notes on my Mac and vice versa? Utterly stupid having two different systems which don't talk to each other.
Why don't my subscribed calendars on my Mac sync to my iPhone over MobileMe?
Why can't I click on the location in a Calendar event and have it bring up the location in the Map??
Why can't I get preview messages for emails when the phone is locked in the same way that I do with text messages?
Why do I still have to go through that stupid system logging into O2's website with a code to view incoming picture messages? Shouldn't they just come straight to my iPhone now?
All in all, LAME.
Almost painless update process, apart from the authentication logjam. I do like the new options on podcasts and audiobooks previously mentioned. Big improvement to YouTube too, logging into your account for favourites and you can now see comments...actually, not sure if that last one's a good thing.
No one gets video unless they have the 3GS, O2 also have said on they're website for about a week now that mms is only for 3G and 3GS customers. Also in fairness to O2 they have the upgrade path on they're site under iPhone.
That aside, it all went pretty smoothly for me, upgraded as soon as iTunes would allow(6 on the dot) and 20 minutes later had a fully functioning iPhone 3g running 3.0. One small gripe however, the first time connecting after upgrade, it told me I weren't using an O2 sim and that I could basically brick my phone, a quick disconnect and shutdown of iTunes sorted that. Apart from that all seems well. Not sure what to make if it really, some cool stuff in there but smells of 'could of done better'
I also note the flamers are having a field day.
MMS wise, O2 had automatically sent me settings before I'd had a chance to fiddle with most stuff.
Peace out
I moved from WinMo6 to iPhone back in February and even though I found the device restrictive.... everything just works. I was really looking forward to the OS 3.0 rollout when I heard that Bluetooth support for stereo headphones would be added as I hate wires and have a pair of Jabra BT620s that I used to use with my WinMo phone. Sadly the iPhone support doesn't go so far as to include the track selection controls, but otherwise not too bad. Maybe they can add full support in the next update?
I was able to update mine. but got really fedup with the 02 MMS mess up.
I even did a restore to try and get it to work. then this morning got out of bed and it worked.
Anyways. I think it has got slower. seems to take a bit longer to notice i have pressed a "button"
I have had many phones over the years and still have a Vario 2 on t-mobile and that has WM 5 on it. and it has a real keyboard lol.
WM has been rubbish since day one. I'm no iphone fanboy but I know when something works and just about everytime the iPhone does.
I have noticed I used to have to do lots of resets on WM.
The iPhone has some problems. it does not like most of my bluetooth devices and takes what seems like an age to work with them. so times its picks them up sometimes it does not.
Also I hate it when the screen does not come on when i get a call. and that means i miss the Wife Phoning, My mistake that might be a good thing...
I really want apple to update the iPhone so we get the fastest possible speed from the 600+ cpu
I have to charge mine a few times a day as it is, so it would not make that much diff to me. or have a CPU speed control for people that need phone battery life over fuction sometimes.
The iPhone may not be the best phone in most people eyes but it does work and in most cases is stable. to me that makes it worth more as I can use the phone when i want to and it work...
Paris even she is not that Dumb to use Windows Mobile OS
Installed the update without a problem, and the new features are nice but somewhat belated. But bluetooth is still far to crippled for my liking - I still can't sync my iphone with my macbook unless I use a USB cable. Am I just being dumb?
I'm also pissed off with O2 for expecting me to pay an extra £14 a month to enable tethering. I'm already paying for "unlimited" data. I just want to connect a satnav to get traffic updates.
I want copy and paste and I want it to be easy to use.
Apple may have designed a device that makes it difficult to implement but I don't see why that means I should no longer want it.
So yes, I'm complaining and no I don't think paying an extra $10 to have copy and paste badly implemented on my iPod touch is value for money.
I dearly wish my loyalty to the manufacturer was stronger than my desire to have something that works the way I want but sadly for me it is just not true love.
Paris because she knows how to hand jobs love.
>> don't know whether it's because i'm using IMAP, but spotlight only seems to search email titles. Pretty lame, if you ask me.
Have you set it download emails or just headers, if it is the former and it is still only searching headers, then that is a bit lame.
>> Plus, some sort of preview in the search results is necessary, as otherwise checking each result by opening and closing Maill every time is a right ballsache.
I can see how that would be a problem.
With regard to cut-n-paste, I really don't see the point without a global clipboard to allow cut-n-paste between applications. I don't think I will be upgrading anytime soon.
>Where's the app for To Do Items, synced from my Mac over MobileMe?
Missing, it's the last glaring omission for me, however the App store has several dozen alternatives, many with free over the air syncing ALA MobileMe.
>Why the hell can't I sync Notes on my iPhone to Notes on my Mac and vice versa? Utterly stupid having two different systems which don't talk to each other.
Because you're being dumb? It's all there. Are you looking at Stickies on your desktop, not Notes in mail or something?
>Why don't my subscribed calendars on my Mac sync to my iPhone over MobileMe?
You can't subscribe to a subscription. You merely need to subscribe to the calendar again on your iPhone. Right click on the subscribed calendar in your desktop, click "Copy URL", save it as a note in Mail, or email it to yourself. Open up the note or email on your phone, click the link, confirm when it asks if you want to subscribe. Done.
>Why can't I click on the location in a Calendar event and have it bring up the location in the Map??
Dunno, but you can cut and paste it into Maps...
>Why can't I get preview messages for emails when the phone is locked in the same way that I do with text messages?
I would hazard a guess that it's because texts are plain text, and emails could be anything. How will they offer a preview of a mail that consists of links to images on a seperate server? All you would see if the text at the top of most mails that says "If you cannot read this mail, ....." etc.
>Why do I still have to go through that stupid system logging into O2's website with a code to view incoming picture messages? Shouldn't they just come straight to my iPhone now?
Text "mms" to 1010 to setup the feature on your account, presuming you already have a text bundle on contract. Then they will show in messages like they should.
>All in all, LAME.
All in all, do some homework before complaining, you don't have a leg to stand on.
why application vendors failing to update applications after months of being told about an update to the iPhone OS is the app devs fault, when hardware vendors failing to update drivers after months of being told about Vista is Microsoft's fault.
Also:
"The iPhone may not tick all of your feature bloat, sorry, boxes ticked, but it doesn't need to. It does what it does really well, certainly better than the two HTC devices that I have owned - build quality is an order of magnitude greater on the iPhone too. Generally, if there is a missing feature you'll find that there's an app for that. Lots of them a free too."
I would have thought that MMS was a pretty straightforward feature. Welcome to the picture messaging revolution! In other news, Blur and Oasis battling it out to top the charts!
Seriously, I think the iPhone is actually a contender as a phone now. It's still not perfect, but it's a lot closer to the baseline for smartphones, and actually makes it (maybe) worthwhile getting one. All that needs to happen now is for the stupid prices to come down.
I found only one issue with the upgrade - my Favourites in the Phone function were replaced by the numbers and not the names that originally displayed - otherwise the upgrade has been seamless.
One great feature I discovered was that the iPhone recognises and address and allows you to launch Maps to pinpoint the location.
In South Africa, Vodacom (Vodafone) also does not support MMS and Tethering and still does not support Visual Voicemail.
I run an original UK O2 18 month old iPhone. Jailbreaked with Pwnage tool and unlocked and used on Orange PAYGO. I decided to do a wipe and Restore to 2.2.1 and then rejailbreak so that I was starting afresh to do the OS 3.0 update.
I updated (not restored) and it stayed unlocked and activated, but obviously jailbreak is lost until the new version of Pwnage tool is released.
No MMS option though (sending or receiving), not sure if this is Orange or because it's not the G3 model. Location services seems to have broken in apps such as Twitterific and Maps. "The location could not be determined"
> >Where's the app for To Do Items, synced from my Mac over MobileMe?
> Missing, it's the last glaring omission for me, however the App store has several dozen alternatives, many with free over the air syncing ALA MobileMe.
Great. So I pay loads for MobileMe and now have to pay even more for a separate set of applications and syncing systems that I must keep maintained on my iPhone and Macs. No thanks.
> >Why the hell can't I sync Notes on my iPhone to Notes on my Mac and vice versa? Utterly stupid having two different systems which don't talk to each other.
> Because you're being dumb? It's all there. Are you looking at Stickies on your desktop, not Notes in mail or something?
How am I being 'dumb'? I have notes in Apple Mail. I have notes in Notes on my iPhone. There is no overlap between the two. They are completely separate systems. There is no facility in MobileMe to sync these two things to each other. There ought to be.
> >Why don't my subscribed calendars on my Mac sync to my iPhone over MobileMe?
> You can't subscribe to a subscription. You merely need to subscribe to the calendar again on your iPhone. Right click on the subscribed calendar in your desktop, click "Copy URL", save it as a note in Mail, or email it to yourself. Open up the note or email on your phone, click the link, confirm when it asks if you want to subscribe. Done.
MobileMe syncs my subscribed calendars between my Macs so clearly it could also do it to my iPhone. But it doesn't. Which is poor. I shouldn't have to do all this manually.
> >Why can't I click on the location in a Calendar event and have it bring up the location in the Map??
> Dunno, but you can cut and paste it into Maps...
Not the same thing.
> >Why can't I get preview messages for emails when the phone is locked in the same way that I do with text messages?
> I would hazard a guess that it's because texts are plain text, and emails could be anything. How will they offer a preview of a mail that consists of links to images on a seperate server? All you would see if the text at the top of most mails that says "If you cannot read this mail, ....." etc.
When I get a text message it says 'text from FOO'. All I want is a similar thing that tells me I have an email from FOO without having to unlock my iPhone and go into Mail to see who the new mail is from. It really wouldn't be hard to add such an obviously desirable option.
> >Why do I still have to go through that stupid system logging into O2's website with a code to view incoming picture messages? Shouldn't they just come straight to my iPhone now?
> Text "mms" to 1010 to setup the feature on your account, presuming you already have a text bundle on contract. Then they will show in messages like they should.
Yes, I found that earlier. It should have happened automatically, but didn't.
> All in all, do some homework before complaining, you don't have a leg to stand on.
Steady on, Dan. Do you work for Apple or something?
@Anonymous Coward Posted Thursday 18th June 2009 12:26 GMT
Probably not, but it does sound like you are astroturfing a bit... Here an outrageous idea. Google it. The notes thing is frustrating - but there's and app for that. Evernote - it's free too! As for calendar problems - go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars, select MobileMe under accounts, then MAKE SURE IT'S TURNED ON. It works for everyone else. Not executing this simple set of instructions is poor. Does you mummy still hold your hand when you cross the road?
@Shakje - Not missed MMS one bit. Never used it on my other handsets. If I want to send someone a picture, I use email, as I've yet to see a camera on a phone that worth using. I think *that* was the point. It wasn't so much forgotten or not implemented due to inability to code it, rather it was deemed surpluses to requirements by the engineers it was left out by design. Apple have obviously listened to the complaints and acted accordingly. I find it funny that you mock iPhone for being behind, yet WinMo devices STILL can't retain data if they lose battery power (and I mean EVERYTHING) and STILL need a stylus! (On an historical pedancy note, the whole Blur v Oasis thing happened in the summer of 1995, possibly whilst you were wearing nappies - and at least 7 years before commercially available MMS enabled phones - Eminem and Badly Drawn Boy would have been more accurate). I guess it depends on your priorities, eh? I won't pretend the device is perfect - but it shit's on the Blackberry and 2 Windows Mobile devices I've owned. I also note that Nokia is trumpeting the N97's ability to enter text messages using the 'traditional' number pad method. Nice.
>Great. So I pay loads for MobileMe and now have to pay even more for a separate set of applications and syncing systems that I must keep maintained on my iPhone and Macs. No thanks.
There are free ones, there are (very) expensive ones, there are ones in the middle. There are ones that provide replacement desktop task management software, there are ones that integrate into your existing data stores. Choose. I don't think you will see a native sync until the desktop side of things receives a significant bump in usefulness, maybe with Snow Leopard.
>How am I being 'dumb'? I have notes in Apple Mail. I have notes in Notes on my iPhone. There is no overlap between the two. They are completely separate systems. There is no facility in MobileMe to sync these two things to each other. There ought to be.
You didn't mention MobileMe, just that they wouldn't sync. They do, mine are synced anyway, and not through manual intervention. It may have done it over USB during the upgrade and associated fiddling whilst cabled up, but the point is that they do sync. Maybe OTA sync would be nice, but it's not as important as emails and calendars.
>MobileMe syncs my subscribed calendars between my Macs so clearly it could also do it to my iPhone. But it doesn't. Which is poor. I shouldn't have to do all this manually.
It would be better to have it let you pick and choose to have it done for you, but it's not a huge job to setup the initial config yourself. No worse then inputting your MobileMe settings in the first pace, in fact easier as it just requires you to click on a URL link.
>Not the same thing.
That sort of behaviour works from many other areas like email, so I'm sure it will come in a future update.
> When I get a text message it says 'text from FOO'. All I want is a similar thing that tells me I have an email from FOO without having to unlock my iPhone and go into Mail to see who the new mail is from. It really wouldn't be hard to add such an obviously desirable option.
It doesn't just do that tho does it, it previews the contents also, so it's not exactly like for like. Have you requested this as a feature? I'm not sure having to acknowledge email notifications for every email I get is desirable at all. Maybe a choice would be good.
>Yes, I found that earlier. It should have happened automatically, but didn't.
Actually for many people it did happen automatically, but you could jump the queue by requesting is manually. I reckon that O2 had a good couple of million accounts to make such ammendments to.
>Steady on, Dan. Do you work for Apple or something?
No, although I wouldn't be averse to the idea.
This is potentially the 2nd entirely free OS update that you have had on your phone. You've complained and called it lame because it doesn't have a few features that it never said it would have anyway, all of which are fairly minor (in my opinion) things, like slightly altered email notification, OTA notes syncing, and ToDo/Calendar syncing.
Half of these are MobileMe specific issues, and would mean nothing to people who don't have that anyway. All of them have or will have workarounds via other apps. Maybe they will update MM in a few weeks to support a few more features? Perhaps they didn't want to bite off more than they could chew this year?
You've utterly ignored all the new features you DO have (with the exception of MMS, which you still had a sowner on because you had to type a 3 character text to initialise), and pronounced it lame because it doesn't do things that you want.
...the new finder feature is also finding and happily displaying emails that I deleted over four months ago, had removed from trash, and also do not exist on either the server or my desktop unit. Quite how it's achieving this feat without lying to me that a mail has been deleted is beyond me.
"Geez, okay, we get it, Apple cannot do anything right in your eyes. You've proven your point."
As someone who carries both, I feel I am more qualified than "fan boys" of either kind to comment. I'm NOT looking for Apple to make a Blackberry or for RIM to make an iPhone - different tools for different people/uses/tastes.
Just to me - like all things Apple - the hype surrounding this "upgrade" was far, far out of proportion to the reality of the upgrade.
"I find it funny that you mock iPhone for being behind, yet WinMo devices STILL can't retain data if they lose battery power (and I mean EVERYTHING)"
I find it funny that someone who's so quick to criticise a fellow iPhone user for failing to check their facts before criticising the beloved device, fails to check their own facts before attempting to play the superiority card over Windows Mobile. Google for "windows mobile persistent storage", then come back and explain to us how WinMo devices STILL lose EVERYTHING if they lose power...
I'm another WinMo user (HTC Touch Pro), who also has access to an iPhone 3G (when my wife isn't playing Peggle on it...), and I think I've spent long enough using both to have a realistic (as opposed to fanboi-blinkered) appreciation of the pros and cons of each.
"So what you are trying to tell me is that your Touch is better that my iPhone? You are wrong. I owned a HTC Touch. It was shit. Anything that requires a stylus to operate is shit."
That all depends on what you want to be able to do with the device. If you just want to quickly select something, then requiring a stylus IS bad, but even without the full HTC skin I can still place or answer calls and read SMSs without going anywhere near the stylus (and my fingers are far from being stylus-like in their dimensions). I could also write stylus-free SMSs too if that was something I really needed to do. Certain fiddly websites aside, I also do all my web browsing without needing the stylus. So to suggest that WinMo *requires* a stylus is a bit disingenuous. It may work better with one than without, and there may be some things that are a bit too fiddly to achieve without it unless you've got good aim with a sharp fingernail or the patience of several saints, but there's nothing about either the hardware or software that makes the stylus mandatory.
Now, on the other hand, the fact that WinMo devices do work with styluses (stylii?) means that, in addition to finger-driven apps with correspondingly chunky UIs, WinMo can also be used for apps where greater accuracy/resolution is required or desirable, without the need for any work-arounds like temporarily zooming into the general area of selection. I do like the responsiveness of the iPhone screen compared to the TouchPro, when both are being prodded with a fingertip, but I'm happy to live with the slightly lower fingertip-responsiveness given that the stylus is always ready and waiting for those times when I'd rather have higher accuracy than higher responsiveness.
"On the iPhone, copy and paste is implemented brilliantly and works really well between apps, extremely intuative"
Whereas on WinMo it's... what, exactly? I highlight the text to be copied, hold down the stylus/fingertip until the context menu pops-up, and select Copy. Move to where the text needs to be pasted, touch and hold, select Paste, and there you are. Alternatively, many apps will also let you select Cut/Copy/Paste from the app menu, if you're so pressed for time that you can't wait for the pop-up menu to appear.
Is that really any less intuitive than the way iPhone3.0 behaves? Perhaps it is if you're coming to the iPhone from a non-computing background, but to anyone with even the remotest experience with a computer, the WinMo approach isn't going to take them by surprise or leave them wondering how to achieve it.
"Signal strength is better than the Touch too."
I presume you were testing both phones at the same time, in the same location, and on the same network? If not, then I'm not sure you've got sufficient data to be able to make such a definitive statement. Some days in some locations I get better reception on my TouchPro (with a T-Mobile sim) than my wife does on her O2 iPhone, some days in some locations it's the other way around. Neither phone seems to have any obvious advantage over the other as far as overall signal reception is concerned.
"As for 'multitasking' (obviously this is to be the new no copy & paste/mms bête noir of the Nokia/WinMo fanboi's), answer me this. If you can only do one thing at a time on a device, why allow it to run multiple apps that slow it down and drain power?"
Umm, how about being able to play music in the background whilst you browse a website, compose a SMS, twiddle with an Excel spreadsheet etc. etc.? Or how about being able to kick off the delivery of a large MMS/email and then go do something else without having to wait for the message to be sent? The advantage of WinMo here is that you as the user decide which apps to multitask, rather than being limited by what the OS allows you to stick in the background.
"If an app needs to chug away in the back ground, I'd argue that it's been poorly written!"
I'd argue that it's been well written if it's able to do what you asked it to do without needing your constant attention... There's no excuse for an app chewing up processing cycles if it's not doing anything worthwhile (i.e. busy-waiting) - that IS shoddy programming for sure - but to suggest that apps should only run if they've got UI focus is simply ludicrous. I left the world of non-multitasked systems behind over 20 years ago when I bought my first Amiga, and I've no desire to return to it, not even on a pocket-sized device.
"Ultimately, the reason why WinMo fails is due to it trying to be a mobile computer, rather than being a PDA. It one of the reasons why it didn't take off *as* a PDA."
And that's precisely why I love it. Sure, I've also got access to a netbook and three laptops if I want to do some heavy-duty mobile computing (or run something that isn't available on WinMo), but they all suffer from the disadvantage of not being within arms-reach at all times. My TouchPro on the other hand is available 24/7, and gives me the ability to do a lot of stuff as and when I have the time/inclination to do so, rather than having to postpone it until I'm in the vicinity of one of my PCs. It's horses for courses, some people don't want/need all that power in a handheld device, some do, and I for one am very pleased we have the choice.
"Generally, if there is a missing feature you'll find that there's an app for that. Lots of them a free too."
Whilst iPhone apps might be easier to find thanks to the single-source AppStore, I suspect there are more WinMo apps available, with just as many of them being freebies too. And unlike the iPhone, my TouchPro doesn't care where the apps come from or if they've received the Microsoft seal of approval.
One other advantage of WinMo over iPhone - I don't need to infect my PC with iTunes.
"How much are much are Microsoft paying you astroturfers these days? They must be scraping the barrel a bit these days though. It would appear that you can't be bothered to find a spec sheet so you can tell me what features are 'better' implemented in Windows Mobile."
If only Microsoft were paying me to be nice about WinMo... Truth is, I say (mostly) nice things about it because it's the best choice of mobile OSs for the things *I* want out of a mobile OS, but I also realise that it won't be the best match for everyone. What features are better implemented in WinMo? All of them and none of them. It just depends on how each individual user prefers a feature to work. WinMo ticks more boxes for me than anything else, whereas the iPhone ticks more boxes for my wife than WinMo (she's been a WinMo user as long as I have, we started off with his and hers SPV E200's back in the days when Orange were the dogs danglies for mobile data contracts - oh, how times have changed...), and both of them ticked FAR more boxes for her than Android did (after attempting to get to grips with a G1, to say she was less than impressed with both the hardware and the OS would be an understatement of intergalactic proportions).
I think one of the biggest problems the iPhone has is that it's an Apple device, and as such it has to carry around the cult of Apple baggage, which puts off quite a few people. I'll be honest, there are times when I'm sick and tired of the way Apple pushes its products as if they're the best things since sliced bread, conveniently ignoring any other products that might have already been there, done that, and worn the t-shirt so often it's now in danger of falling apart. I'm also far from impressed with their control-freakish nature - any company that can make Microsoft seem like a paragon of open-ness must be doing something seriously wrong...
The iPhone *is* a beautiful piece of kit, both hardware and OS, it just isn't the right system for me. WinMo on a TouchPro, despite the flaws, is. It's as simple as that.
I may never have won the lottery but it seems in all the years ive been using Microsoft products on mobile devices ive really never had a problem....thats right, im the luckest person alive, only time ive hard reset is when a 3rd part app crashes and last time that happened was some point last year whilst i was messing about on it. I mean, i must be trully blessed because EVERYONE knows Windows Mobile sucks, everything Microsoft makes is rubbish. But still, Im able to do all sorts of things....at the same time, very quickly and it doesnt crash, my god, how can that be? it just works, and with the lastest updates available it looks better than android and runs faster than the Iphone. AND, get this, i can install pretty much anything i like on it on any network, Wow, someone should just pay me £1000 and ill send you this wonderful device, my Touch HD is about to make me a fortune, then ill buy another one and give it the Darren Treatment and flog that for a grand too and so on...
OK, this iphone update is good, well done for playing catch up to what i alone (apparently) have had access to for the last 5 years or so, without any issues, but it still doesnt work, oh well then, well done apple, maybe next time huh?.
seems more of an upgrade than this iPhone update! Runs fast, smooth and just the way i like. Never have to use the stylus, and if you actually understand the reason behind having a Resistive stylus capable screen over a capacitive no stylus capability screen then you would understand. WinMo is V big in Asia where people use the stylus to write using the transcribing function. It can even understand MY handwriting (I find it hard to read).
Proud Touch Pro owner
>> >Why the hell can't I sync Notes on my iPhone to Notes on my Mac and vice versa? Utterly stupid having two different systems which don't talk to each other.
>> Because you're being dumb? It's all there. Are you looking at Stickies on your desktop, not Notes in mail or something?
>How am I being 'dumb'? I have notes in Apple Mail. I have notes in Notes on my iPhone. There is no overlap between the two. They are completely separate systems. There is no facility in MobileMe to sync these two things to each other. There ought to be.
You are being dumb because you are describing the pre-3.0 operation in a discussion about 3.0. I wasn't expecting it, but following a sync this morning all of my Apple Mail notes appeared on my iPhone and vice versa.
I'm honestly not impressed with this upgrade....
1. MMS - you can blame AT&T, but every other phone sends MMS on ATT network
2. video recording - why this is not enabled? It can work on iPhone 3G
3. turn-by-turn navigation is missing why?
4. caching feature for maps in areas with no signal is missing why?
5. four digit numeric pin .... well come on
6. no multitasking
7. why do I have to install iTunes to get firmware update for my phone?
So I have to use an SD card to store all my contacts, text, email and data settinfg on then? That's shit. The Touch and Tytn (the two phone models that I owned) had a pitiful 128MB of "persistant memory" - requiring me to buy an SD card to make sure that data was not lost. If the battery ran out of power - batteries do that occasionally - the settings, ie modem settings, mail client settings et c. would disappear. Microsoft officially state that there should be "enough for 72 hours of storage". Never - 72 seconds, maybe. Have they fixed it then? It didn't seem to work when I had them...
I never said OR intemated that WinMo's Copy and Paste paradigm wasn't intuative - that's your own feeling of inadequacy filling blanks that weren't there. But here's an interesting point of debate - moving the GUI paradign forward towards mobile platforms. With Windows Mobile, Microsoft tried to do that literally, and IMHO failed. The interfaces has always been cluttered and busy. The point that I was making to AC is that the Copy and Paste paradigm Apple have developed for the device works extremely well.
Fair enough on the signal strength, but IMHO O2 take an unfair bashing here. With Orange, I was lucky if I got a 3G signal in central London, or Birmingham for that matter. I have *never* had a problem with iPhone OR O2.
iTunes works a treat on the Mac platform, and to be honest, I've not had any problems with it on Windows. ActiiveSync on the other hand, what a crock of shit. Outlook? Bag of wank.
Apps on mobile devices. I can count the times on precisely NO hands the amount of times I used mobile Word or Excel. They are useless IMHO. Also the iPod functionallity works whilst I compose messages or browse thy web (on a browser thaht allows *multiple* windows too). as for your comment "Or how about being able to kick off the delivery of a large MMS/email and then go do something else without having to wait for the message to be sent?" I'm able to do that on my iPhone just fine, ta. Have you looked at or used yor wifes iPhone at all?
We agree on something - choice (and therefore competition) is a good thing, but that's where it ends. The iPhone is an extremely capable device. The (free) ssh app on my iPhone is great for accessing servers - there is a VNC app form doing the same if you need to use a GUI. I can do lots of things on my iPhone - like writing some of these post - I've all but abandoned using email on my desktop. WinMo *isn't* the only device capable of being useful - the reason for my original post.
If WinMo works for you then all power to you. I didn't for me. It might tick all the feature boxes - but for me the majority are poorly implemented or relient on old technology/paradigms (Ie; sylus' - something *else* to loose. Or slide out keyboards - another thing that breaks).
As for the last part - not liking something *purely* because of your percieved prejudices is small minded and blinkered, and frankly childish. You bang on about 'merit' and then write that? You have the chutzpa to insinuate that I'm an fanboy - pot, meet kettle. So Apple aren't allowed to market their stuff now? Are they not allowed to apply quality control to products that carry their brand. 9 years ago, they nearly went bankrupt. They had too many bad products and a clone market that was killing them. They have worked really hard to build the business back up to where it is now, which has been done largly on merit. As for Microsoft being a "paragon of openess", have they released *their* internal API's to the Windows developer comunity then? Didn't think so.
It would appear that I touched raw nevre. Were you the AC that wrote his story about being "down the pub" with his "mate"?
I am finding the landscape texting mode to be less useful than the standard ("portait"?) orientation. In portrait mode, the multiline conversation bubbles take about 4/5ths the width of the screen, which is fine. But landscape mode does not resize these bubbles; they take up only about half of the screen width. Therefore, with the keyboard is visible, you'll probably have to scroll to read the last message in its entirety, unless it's less than about 100 characters. This is a big oversight, in my opinion.
"So I have to use an SD card to store all my contacts, text, email and data settinfg on then? That's shit. The Touch and Tytn (the two phone models that I owned) had a pitiful 128MB of "persistant memory" - requiring me to buy an SD card to make sure that data was not lost. If the battery ran out of power - batteries do that occasionally - the settings, ie modem settings, mail client settings et c. would disappear."
I have to ask, did you *really* own either of those devices? Because the T-Mobile branded version of the Tytn my wife owned never lost data due to a loss of power. And neither should the Touch. Why not? Because they both run on newer versions of WinMo, versions which mandate the use of persistent storage for all of the stuff you claim would disappear.
"Microsoft officially state that there should be "enough for 72 hours of storage". Never - 72 seconds, maybe. Have they fixed it then? It didn't seem to work when I had them..."
Where do they state that in relation to WM5 or above? This 72 hour requirement was part of earlier versions of WinMo, none of which would have been installed on the two devices you mention.
"Apps on mobile devices. I can count the times on precisely NO hands the amount of times I used mobile Word or Excel. They are useless IMHO."
Yes, in YOUR opinion. In my opinion, or in the opinion of countless others who do genuinely find having such apps in your pocket at all times, they're anything but. Just as you seem to think MMS is useless when you can simply email photos to people, ignoring the point that many people use phones without email capabilities but which are MMS enabled, or that MMS is pointless because you've yet to see a phone camera worth taking photos with (ever tried the LG Viewty or similar? They're damn close to being compact cameras with phone functionality tagged on, rather than a phone with a camera). In YOUR seemingly narrow view of the mobile world, the iPhone is all you seem to need, but it's a big wide world out there and not everyone subscribes to the "if it's not in the iPhone, no-one really needs it anyway" mindset.
"Also the iPod functionallity works whilst I compose messages or browse thy web (on a browser thaht allows *multiple* windows too). as for your comment "Or how about being able to kick off the delivery of a large MMS/email and then go do something else without having to wait for the message to be sent?" I'm able to do that on my iPhone just fine, ta. Have you looked at or used yor wifes iPhone at all?"
Yes, I have. Which is my point - in order to achieve these basic abilities, without which the iPhone would truly be a pile of cack, it needs to be able to multitask. So why do you think multitasking is such a bad thing to open up to the user?
Multi-window browsing eh. Most HTC devices now ship with Opera, and there are various other free/payware browsers to choose from, which offer tabbed browsing - so we'll call that even shall we...
"As for the last part - not liking something *purely* because of your percieved prejudices is small minded and blinkered, and frankly childish."
So you're saying Apple don't sometimes overstate or misrepresent the capabilities of their products? The ASA would beg to differ with you here. Or that Apple don't exert a significant level of control over what owners are allowed to do with their own property? They're neither perceived nor prejudices, simply personal opinion based on fact.
"You have the chutzpa to insinuate that I'm an fanboy - pot, meet kettle."
I post using my real name, you post as Mac Phreak... I don't need to insinuate anything, you're doing a damn good job of that all by yourself. And I'm no fanboy, I use whatever device suits my needs, which is why there's a well-used iPod Classic sat next to me. I can appreciate the quality of their products without needing to like the way they do business, can't I?
"So Apple aren't allowed to market their stuff now? Are they not allowed to apply quality control to products that carry their brand."
Of course they can market, but they have a habit of consistently bending the truth to suggest their products are better than the rest, and that's not allowed. If their products are genuinely good - and as I've said plenty of times, I think they mostly are - they'd sell themselves without any hype. Hell, these days the cult of Apple is so strong, just slapping the Apple logo on something will guarantee sales figures most manufacturers would kill for, they simply don't need to do anything more than basic "here's our new product, available from Monday" advertising.
As for QC, I don't have a problem with them shipping only carefully configured devices and only officially sanctioning/supporting Apple-tested apps. It's when they start restricting the abilities of end users to try moving outside that walled garden (orchard?) that I think they need to loosen up a bit. How many iPhone users have ended up going down the jailbreak route because of Apple's over-protective stance?
"As for Microsoft being a "paragon of openess", have they released *their* internal API's to the Windows developer comunity then? Didn't think so."
I didn't say Microsoft were open, just that compared to Apple, and from the perspective of an end-user, their products seem to/actually do offer more freedom and open-ness.
"It would appear that I touched raw nevre. Were you the AC that wrote his story about being "down the pub" with his "mate"?"
No, I've never felt the need to hide behind a cloak of anonymity. And I can't remember the last time I set foot in a pub...
> >How am I being 'dumb'? I have notes in Apple Mail. I have notes in Notes on my iPhone. There is no overlap between the two. They are completely separate systems. There is no facility in MobileMe to sync these two things to each other. There ought to be.
> You are being dumb because you are describing the pre-3.0 operation in a discussion about 3.0. I wasn't expecting it, but following a sync this morning all of my Apple Mail notes appeared on my iPhone and vice versa.
No, YOU are being dumb because you didn't read what I wrote, specifically the word 'MobileMe'. Days might go by in which I don't connect my phone to my Mac with the cable, so syncing over the cable is no use to me at all. I want wireless syncing of Notes and To Do Items to my iPhone over MobileMe, and for the price I'm paying for my iPhone plus $99 a year for MobileMe I should bloody well have it by now. That is why this update is disappointing for me.
I can't be bothered. Calling me a liar, saying that *I'm* hiding behind anonymity, Chris 72? Pathetic. My Tytn (SVP M3100 - actually made worse with Orange "customisations") with it's pesristent memory was a pile of junk , both in terms of build quality AND operation. That was my experience. Yours has obviously been better. Well done you. Do you want a fucking medal? All camera phones are shit - yes, even the LG's. Why? Simple physics. It seem that whatever is done to, added to, or even *invented for* the iPhone won't be good enough. I stand by everything I said - especially YOUR blinkered views towards Apple products. Your whole tirade was about using the best tool for the job - so long as it isn't Apple. Your loss.
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