US iPhone MMS Rollout a Success (at least in the Midwest)

A couple days ago, MMS finally arrived for the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS in the United States. Here in Nebraska, the rollout from AT&T seemed to be a success. Granted, we don’t have near the amount of iPhones on the AT&T network here in the land of corn as San Francisco does.

My experience occurred around 12:15 pm on Friday, when I saw Twitter light up with reports that the carrier profile update was available in iTunes. So I slapped my iPhone into my Griffin Simplifi (if you don’t have on these on your desk, you seriously should get one), and clicked Check for Update in iTunes. The new profile installed in about 2 seconds.

Then I hopped into the Messages app on my iPhone, and was baffled as to why I didn’t have the little camera icon. Silly me, I had to reboot the phone. After doing so, I now had MMS on my iPhone.

Naturally, I snapped a picture of my son and sent it to his Grandma. She claims she didn’t get it, but said she’s also been mass deleting texts from friends and family after a surgery she underwent recently. However, I did shortly receive a picture from a friend’s Blackberry, along with the nice little note, “Let me introduce you to a new technology called Picture Messaging. LAUGH.” Har har.

Anyway, that’s my experience. Care to share yours in the poll and/or comments?

How did the AT&T Rollout of MMS for iPhone 3G and 3GS end up going for you?

The Return of the King

A little note: I meant to write this up in short order after the September iPod event, however, some family health issues moved things such as the blog from even the back burner to off the stove. My apologies to you, readers, but family is by far the most important thing.

At Apple’s predictably annual iPod music event on September 9, 2009, Apple fans worldwide were finally able to welcome Steve Jobs back to the stage after his medical leave.

I believe Apple continued in great stride without Steve at the helm for his 6-month absence, although I have to say it is great to have him back at Apple and feeling well-enough to give a keynote.

Don’t get me wrong, any company would benefit from a presenter like Phil Schiller, but Phil just isn’t Steve.

Well, I’ve already come right out and shared the best and most newsworthy part of event, but there were some other highlights. If you remember, I shared my predictions a week prior to the event. Shall we see what happened?

iTunes

iTunes 9 did indeed debut. As I predicted, I was disappointed in iTunes getting a complete overhaul from Carbon to Cocoa. Instead, the interface was tweaked a little, and a few new features were added (most of them pretty handy).

The Genius feature now includes Genius Mixes, which Apple described as being like a radio station of your music that just goes great together. So far, the feature is quite nice, especially when you just want music to play for a long time while you work. It’s definitely better than just hitting shuffle r using iTunes DJ.

If you use an iPhone or iPod touch, you can now mange your apps on your home screens via a virtual interface within iTunes. This is a freaking Godsend.

The iTunes Store has an entirely new interface and I like it (it’s been rewritten in Webkit). I was a little perturbed when I saw that the Shopping Cart disappeared and everything is 1-Click now. That is, until I discovered the new Wish List, which basically serves the same function as the Shopping Cart. Also, the rumored social media integration is present, but only in the Store and (thankfully) not as profound as I feared it might be. Quite simply, the iTunes Store allows you to post links to content in Facebook and Twitter. Fairly harmless, and entirely optional.

Some albums are getting extra content called iTunes LP. Think of it as a digital version of the booklets that come in CDs. Movies on iTunes also gained iTunes Extras, which is the same as the DVD menu and special features.

Lastly, the best announcement concerning iTunes is Home Sharing. Finally it is easy to transfer media (music, movies, TV shows, audiobooks and even iPhone/iPod touch apps) between computers in your home. My wife and I used to sneakernet music we wanted from each other’s computers via thumbdrive. Now we can easily browse each other’s content and drag & drop it right within iTunes. This is by far the best feature to hit iTunes in a very long time.

iPhone OS 3.1

OS 3.1 for the iPhone and iPod touch shipped out the day of the event. This solved my abhorrent battery life issue, but did nothing to improve wi-fi reception on my iPhone 3G. (I used to be able to get wi-fi anywhere in my apartment, but since OS 3.0, I can only get it in my office and half of my living room. Doesn’t even register in my bedroom. Good thing there’s 3G in Lincoln).

iPod Updates

I have to admit, this is the part where things really turned upside down for me. I was sure the iPod touch would get a camera and I was skeptical about the iPod nano getting it. Turns out the iPod touch got a little speed and capacity bump, and no camera.

The iPod nano received brighter colors, a slightly larger screen, and a video camera (can’t take still pictures). It also gained a pedometer and FM radio.

I figured the iPod classic had seen the end of days, but it limps on at the same price point, sporting a 160 GB hard drive again (up from 120 GB last year).

And the shuffle indeed received more colors, adding pink, blue, and green to the black and silver. Also, you can pay $20 more for a highly scratchable stainless steel premium version. *rolls eyes*

Wrap-Up

All in all, it was a good event. New iPhone software, modest improvements to iTunes, and the annual refresh of iPods (though disapppointing as far as the iPod touch) are all very nice.

However, the biggest takeaway is Steve Jobs has returned, and I don’t think any of us could be upset about that.

AT&T Announces iPhone MMS Availability

AT&T today announced MMS availability for the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS. The service will be available on September 25, 2009 via a software update.

MMS arrived as a feature of iPhone OS 3.0 in June. iPhone carriers around the world were able to support the feature, found on almost any mobile phone in the past few years, on launch day. However, AT&T has not yet supported the feature. As the exclusive carrier of the iPhone in the US, many customers (myself included) have been disappointed by AT&T.

I have to wonder if the software update AT&T is speaking of will be a simple carrier profile update or if they have accidentally announced the release date of iPhone OS 3.1. I posited yesterday that iPhone OS 3.1 would show up at next week’s iPod event, just as iPhone OS 2.1 did last year. This could still happen as Apple could issue a small carrier profile update for MMS on the 25th, but I wouldn’t put it past Apple to release 3.1 for the new iPod touch models and say it will be out in a couple of weeks for iPhone users.

Time will tell. 6 days to be exact.

It's Only Apple, But We Like It

In one week Apple will hold its annual September music-themed event. This year the slogan on the announcement reads, “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it.” Others say this is a Rolling Stones reference. I have no clue. I didn’t listen to the Stones. What I do know is that the announcement image this time around gives little-to-no allusion as to what may be announced at the event. No “hidden theme” so to speak. It’s just a shadow dancer with an iPod.

And what’s up with that? We haven’t seen Apple bring out the shadow dancers in at least a year or so. I do notice that the iPod the shadow dancer is holding has the cable coming from the bottom of the device. Perhaps he/she/it is holding an iPod touch? That would make sense. The iPod touch is practically the flagship iPod these days.

This brings me to chipping in my two cents on hopes and predictions of what may transpire next week.

iTunes

Let’s start with iTunes. The rumor mill has been saying we’ll see iTunes 9 with social networking integration. I suppose this means you’ll be able to tweet or post to Facebook whatever song you are listening to. Gag. I could care less. It just sounds like more feature bloat to me.

What I would rather see is for iTunes to get the Snow Leopard treatment. Few new features, major refinement. iTunes is still a Carbon app. (Carbon is the transitionary language used for porting Classic Mac OS 8/9 apps to OS X). With Snow Leopard, Apple ditched Carbon and moved everything over to native Cocoa. I mean, they even rewrote the entire Finder from the ground up. And it did wonders for the Finder’s performance.

iTunes has been begging for a revamp for a couple of years now, in my opinion. I’d like to see Apple rewrite iTunes from the ground up, throwing out years of crufty code that has built up and bogged down performance.

I’d rather see this than have social networking in iTunes. I have a feeling I’ll be disappointed.

iPhone OS 3.1

iPhone OS 3.1, which has been in beta with developers for a couple of months, will be available for the iPhone and iPod touch. I just hope it does for iPhone 3.0 what iPhone 2.1 did for 2.0. And that is to be what Apple should have shipped a couple months ago.

iPod updates

It’s basically a given that the iPods will get refreshed. My thoughts are short and sweet here.

The iPod touch will remain at current price points, but move to 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB. They will also see the inclusion of a camera. Many spy shots have surfaced over the past month showing this. If the photos are to be believed (and many do) it looks as if there is a pinhole next to the camera. My bet is that is for a small mic for video capture. Because video is kind of stupid without audio. The location of the mic makes sense for trying to limit the use of it to video capture. It would be odd to use a mic there for VOIP calls. And let’s face it, if you want to make a phone call on an Apple device, Apple would rather have you by an iPhone.

Internally, I think the iPod touch will gain a faster CPU, GPU, and more memory like the iPhone 3GS did earlier this summer. Externally, I think it will stay the same with the addition of the camera.

The iPod nano…I’m not sure. Traditionally, Apple has modified the overall design every year. However, rumors say the nano will retain the same design and gain a camera. This seems odd to me. Mainly because the iPod nano does not have Internet connectivity. See, the iPod touch has wi-fi, and can upload pictures to Flickr or MobileMe or wherever. The iPhone 3GS can upload video to YouTube and other services. Apple’s touchscreen devices have browsers and email clients. Cameras make sense.

Unless the iPod nano is getting drastically redesigned with a touchscreen (which would be cool, but I doubt it) I can’t see it gaining a camera. I really have no idea what Apple may do with the nano.

The iPod shuffle was just updated around 6 months ago. Perhaps more color choices than black or silver. Perhaps nothing.

That leaves the iPod classic. I think this is going away. Yes, it is iconic. Yes, it is the only iPod that holds more than 32GB of data. But if the iPod touch moves to 64GB, I think that seriously narrows the market. There is more incentive for a consumer to sacrifice some storage for the benefits of the iPod touch OS. Besides, how many people really fill up 120GB on an iPod?

Also, many of the manufacturers of the 1.8” hard drives that the classic utilizes are scaling down production drastically. Perhaps that is because Apple isn’t ordering too many of them these days.

The Mythical iTablet

Nothing to see here, people. Move along. Seriously, I’m not expecting the tablet this year. Developers will need time to makes apps for it. If Apple is planning to release it in 2009, it will get its own special event, likely in October. Why October? Because Apple has done events for the holiday season in October.

Steve Jobs

I think he’ll be at the event, he’ll do a little talking, but let other executives like Joz and Schiller do the heavy lifting, just like the November 2008 event when the unibody MacBook Pro debuted.

What do you think will happen next week?

The Name is Leopard...Snow Leopard

On Friday, August 28th Apple released Snow Leopard into the wild to feast upon Macs everywhere. Mine arrived via FedEx about 2:00 pm. I’m guessing that with the $29 price point, many users are upgrading, as the FedEx driver who delivered my new kitty said he had over 1,000 boxes from Apple on his truck, and there were easily over 10,000 Apple boxes in the Lincoln, NE facility when he arrived earlier that day. And that’s just in Lincoln, NE, folks.

I set about installing Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro immediately, as I had already backed up in anticipation. I also upgraded any software I could to latest versions (many of which already were sporting Snow Leopard compatibility). I chose to do the standard issue upgrade from the installer, knowing that if it was super glitchy I had a backup I could do a clean install from. The upgrade process of dusting some Snow on Leopard took about 35 minutes.

And I am happy to report that the upgrade process was flawlessly smooth. The benefits of going to Snow Leopard are simply staggering. The chief attribute that stands out above all the rest is speed. This is one fast cat. Booting up is faster, going to sleep is faster, many apps run much faster (CandyBar is a great example. I’m used to opening it then checking Twitter while it loads all the system icons. It takes only a couple seconds on Snow Leopard), and even shutting down is faster (5 seconds by my clock).

Visual Changes



Visually, there are very few things different than Leopard. All the menus within the Dock are now black with white text and a stunning blue highlight (like the Spotlight search bar, not Aqua). Personally, I think these new black menus look very wonderful. I wish they were persistent throughout the system such as contextual menus or menus from the menu bar, which are still translucent gray.

Exposé

Exposé has been one of my favorite features of Mac OS X since it debuted with 10.3 Panther. I can’t think of a day using my Mac since that I haven’t invoked Exposé at least once. However, it is also a feature that hasn’t seen any (user-visible) improvement since its origin. That has changed in 10.6 Snow Leopard. Exposé has received a bit of an overhaul in how it displays windows. It used to be that windows scaled to fit the screen in an inconsistent way. Some windows were quite large, some were quite small, and they ended up in various areas of the screen without any rhyme or reason. Now windows scale to a near uniform zoom level and arrange themselves in a grid. Hovering your cursor over a window while using Exposé then pressing spacebar activates QuickLook to enlarge the window briefly, so you can make sure that is the window you wish to select.

Exposé is a great feature that is now married to another great feature of OS X – The Dock. By clicking and holding on the icon of an open app in the Dock, Exposé is triggered to show windows from only that app. Similarly, if you click and drag a file from the Finder (or wherever) and hold it over an active icon in the Dock, Dock Exposé kicks in, showing windows for that app, which you can then drop the file into the desired window. Making Dock Exposé spring-loaded was a great idea. Props to whoever at Apple coded that.

One last thing about Exposé – if you have minimized windows, those show up as well. They appear as smaller windows beneath a thin line separating minimized from non-minimized windows. It’s a nice trick.

(Note concerning minimized windows: you can now choose to have minimize windows behind the app’s Dock icon instead of piling up in the right side of your Dock. Problem is, there isn’t a visual cue that windows have been minimized to the app icon aside from Exposé.)

Stacks

The list view of Stacks gains the same black theme as other menu items in the Dock. Fan view looks exactly the same. However Grid view received some new-feature-love in Snow Leopard. Grid view now supports the ability to drill down into folders. Clicking on a folder in a Grid view Stack now shows the contents of that folder, and places a back arrow (very similar to the back arrows in the iPhone’s user interface) at the top left of the open Stack. If the number of contents of a Stack in Grid view exceed the visibility of the Stack interface, a scroll bar now appears. These enhancements actually make the Grid view useful, though I still prefer List view for Stacks with many items.

There are a few other nuances of the user interface that have been refined, but I should leave some stuff for you to discover on your own.

QuickTime X

Apple drastically revamped QuickTime. The user interface is now black with inline controls that fade in and out as needed (along with the title bar). The result is a playing video that just floats in the middle of your screen. Hardcore QuickTime 7 Pro users will outcry at the lack of some very high end features, but QuickTime 7 is an optional install that will reside in the Utilities folder. For me, QuickTime X does it for me. The ability to do minor trim edits (anything else I can use iMovie for) is fine. The big seller for me is the ability to do a screencast recording. If I am unable to do a screen share via iChat to help out friends and family, I can record a quick tutorial video and send it to them. Perfect.

Under the Hood

It’s no secret that the majority of Snow Leopard’s enhancements are under the hood. Consumers won’t notice these enhancements outright. The only way mere mortals notice these things is through perception – such as “speed” and “stability.”

As for the perception of increased speed, many refinements and optimizations to Mac OS X as a whole contribute a lot towards that. However, within a few months, I believe users will notice vast speed improvements as third-party developers update their applications to take advantage of new “under-the-hood” technologies in Snow Leopard. Chiefly I am talking about Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL.

Grand Central Dispatch will allow developers to easily split up tasks in their apps between the different processing cores in our modern-day Macs. This was achievable in Leopard, but it was extremely difficult. Now this can be achieved much easier now that Apple has laid down a uniform path for all developers.

OpenCL allows developers to access the extreme processing power that is often idle in our graphic processors. Applications that require a lot of computational processing power will now be able to call upon the GPU to churn through data faster. I imagine in the near future, apps such as Photoshop will take advantage of this and be able to complete tasks like PhotoMerge much faster.

As for the reliability of Mac OS X overall, things are very promising. Instead of adding “300+ new features” to OS X like in Leopard, Apple introduced very few features. Instead they went through OS X with a fine tooth comb and did a massive spring cleaning. This is reflected in that many users will regain around 6 or 7 GB of hard drive space (I’ve heard reports of up to 20 GB). Apple threw out a lot of cruft, and good for them. One of those pieces of cruft was support for PowerPC legacy machines. My grandfather is actually affected by this, as he bought an iBook G4 about a month before the Intel MacBook was released to replace it. He is stuck at Leopard unless he buys a new machine. But the last PowerPC Mac was released nearly four years ago. It’s time for OS X to move on.

Conclusions

So far, my Snow Leopard experience has been delightful. Everything is snappier, all of my apps work correctly (as far as I can tell), and I’ve only encountered one slight bug (with the 4-finger Exposé gesture on my MacBook Pro’s trackpad). One flagrant bug. That’s about 39 fewer flagrant bugs than when I went from Tiger to Leopard. The refinements are wonderful. The price tag was perfect. $29. You can’t beat that. If you have Leopard, you’d be silly not to upgrade to Snow Leopard (unless a critical app you use isn’t compatible yet).

Overall, I’m very glad Apple sat this round out for adding loads of new features. I believe Snow Leopard has laid the groundwork for Apple to build an amazing next generation of OS X.

Twitterrific 2.1 Fluffs the Blue Bird's Feathers

Yesterday Apple finally approved the first substantial feature update to my favorite Twitter application for the iPhone – Twitterrific. The app had been sitting in the approval queue for quite a few weeks. The new version brings a flock of new features. I’ll go over my favorites here. The colossal list of all the changes can be found at Twitterrific’s version history page.

First and foremost, I had started with Twitterrific since the opening day of the App Store. But version 1.x lacked many advanced features, especially when Tweetie came on the scene. I had resisted Tweetie for quite a while, but when I started managing a second Twitter account, I ended up on Tweetie out of necessity.

I switched back to the blue bird when version 2.0 came out and was instantly won back. Over time though, I did find that the new blue bird was missing a few features that Tweetie had that I really loved. Twitterrific 2.1 has taken care of all that, and is reigning supreme yet again.

Here’s what Tweetie had that Twitterrific now has:

• New “Load More…” button to retrieve older tweets in the timeline.


• Added a photo viewer for images on yfrog, Twitpic, and Twitgoo. (This is instead of just loading the web page for the photo, as Twitterrific had always done. This is MUCH faster.)


• Tap on the avatar in the author info view to view the avatar full size.


• Added following and followers buttons to author view.

Granted, these are not drastic things that I couldn’t live without, but they round out the experience of the app. Possibly my favorite is the custom image viewer, especially for Twitpic. The old method of loading the whole Twitpic web page was time consuming and cumbersome, as you’d have to zoom to see the image every time. Now you get a wonderful fullscreen image that loads quickly. Nice.

Some other new features that I am loving is the “Address Book” view (signified by a rolodex card), a YouTube videos play within the in-app browser, the built-in web browser supports landscape view, in-app email support, and the ability to translate a tweet to your native language.

The “address book” is a wonderful feature. From either the timeline view or posting view, you can bring up your followers, who you’re following, and a search area to view an account and create a mention or direct message. Very nice.

Utilizing the in-app YouTube viewer and in-app email in OS 3.0 is nice. An app’s experience is greatly improved when you don’t have to leave the app all the time.

For iPhone 3GS owners, you getting some special attention and love, too!  You can record, post, and view video from yfrog and TwitVid. The developers note that for yfrog, you need to activate the video setting on yfrog.com.

Also, apparently Twitterrific 2.1 is “optimized for the iPhone 3GS.” Whatever that means. (Not that I’m bitter that I don’t have a 3GS.) (I’m just messing with you all.)

Overall, Twitterrific 2.1 is a solid feature upgrade that really gives the blue bird some new pluck. Twitterrific 2.1 is available in an ad-supported free [App Store] version and a $3.99 ad-free Premium [App Store] version.

P.S. ~ It’s not a bad idea to follow @Twitterrific on the Twitter. App specific news is regularly pumped out there and helpful hints and tips for the app are offered as well.

Convertbot Belongs on Your iPhone (or iPod touch) [u]

There are plenty of times that I want to convert one value to another. For some reason, it usually involves recipes. My wife and I have many recipes that are scaled to feed an army. We’re a three person family. And our just-over-one-year-old son doesn’t exactly eat a large portion.

(Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll eat us out of house & home when he becomes a teenager).

Now, there are other times I’ve needed to convert various values. My go-to place for such a thing has always been Google. See, if you go to Google and type in 48.5 ounces to pounds Google will tell you 48.5 ounces = 3.03125 pounds. Handy, huh?

Great thing is, that even works on my iPhone via Safari.

But I love great design and user interfaces. Heck, I use a Mac, right? How could I not have an appreciation for those? Well, it just so happens that there is an app for that. And it belongs on your iPhone.

I’ve had my eyes on Convertbot [App Store] by Tapbots for quite some time now. It is a gorgeous little app that lives to serve your every conversion whim. It has a wonderful robotic-inspired user interface, complete with sound effects that just makes the experience gush with gadgetry.

And this little app does a lot. Currency, Data Size, Length, Mass, Speed, Temperature, Time, Volume, and Area are the main categories, with many denominations in each one. There is a nice demo video over on the aforelinked Tapbots site. The app normally sells for $1.99.

However, as of this publication, Convertbot is FREE for a “very limited time.” So skip the demo, go make sure it’s still free on the App Store, and add it to your iPhone’s utility belt!

UPDATE: I just discovered there’s is a virtual ton of extra measurement categories that can be enabled in the app’s preferences! They include Angle, Data Rate, Force, Fuel, Illuminance, Power, Pressure, Radioactivity, SI, Typography, and Work.

Get Ready to Dip Your Leopard in Snow

According to MacRumors, Apple today has bestowed the Great Seal of Golden Master upon Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, the next major refinement of Mac OS X. Golden Master is software-speak meaning that the new cat’s code has been frozen and is ready to be pressed to disc, boxed up, and shipped to Mac lovers everywhere.

Well, most Mac users will benefit. If you have an Intel Mac you’re good to go ahead and upgrade. However, if you have a PowerPC Mac (iBook, PowerBook, Mac mini G4, iMac G5 or earlier, or a Power Mac) you’re out of luck. Snow Leopard only supports the Intel-based Macs. But hey, it’s been almost 4 years since Intel Macs made their debut, and that’s a long time in technology years.

And the pricing this time around for a major OS upgrade is terrific. I remember paying $129 each for 10.3 Panther, 10.4 Tiger, and 10.5 Leopard. Snow Leopard will cost less than going to dinner and a movie – a cool $29 for an individual license and $49 for a 5-license Family Pack.

It’s good to note that those aforementioned prices only apply if you already have Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. If you are running an Intel Mac with 10.4 Tiger, you’ll need to buy the Mac Box Set when it is updated to include Snow Leopard. That runs $169, but is a deal in and of itself, as you get Snow Leopard, iLife ‘09, & iWork ‘09 all in one shiny box.

Now for some shameless plugging: I’ve added a box at the top of the sidebar to pre-order Snow Leopard on Amazon.com. Why don’t you treat yourself to a lovely pre-order, which will also give me a pecuniary kickback. Come on, we both deserve it. I used the word pecuniary, that has to count for something. That link will take you to a page to choose from any flavor of Snow Leopard you need.

(Oh, and if you buy anything else in the same shopping session, I’ll get a kickback on that, too. You need a new MacBook Pro, right?)

(One more thing: if you’re reading this in an RSS reader, here’s that Amazon link for you. *wink*)

More Colors than a Box of Crayons

If you’ve ever had to do any amount of web design — no matter how basic — you’ve likely had to match colors for sidebar widgets or some other material. I know any time I add a new widget to the sidebar of this blog, I have to pull out a color picker.

Back in February, my best buddy from Britain, Samantha, wrote an article about a little utility named Pipette. Pipette allows you to use a eyedropper tool to sample a pixel of an image and then grab the hex code so you can easily color-match on the web.

However, I did have a gripe with Pipette — and it is a snobby spoiled Mac user gripe. It’s ugly. The pallette is boring, the icon is 128-pixels when the rest of the Mac world has long since moved to 512-pixel icons. Also, it’s annoying that the window disappears when the app isn’t selected, meaning I can’t just leave it over on the side of the screen for easy access.

But it served a great purpose. And it did its job very well.

And then I stumbled upon Colors by Matt Patenaude. Colors does everything Pipette does, but does it with some modern Mac OS X gloss. The icon is gorgeous and so is the UI.

It also has a couple more tricks than Pipette. Not only can you grab the hex code (#rrggbb) but you can also grab #rgb, rgb(x,x,x) and rgba(x,x,x,x,). Also, you may choose whether or not to include the # sign.

In my book, Colors trumps Pipette in form and function (though I only see myself using hex code). Enjoy.

iPhone OS 3.0.1 fixes SMS threat, maybe more? [updated]

On Friday, July 31, 2009, Apple released iPhone OS 3.0.1 for the iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPhone 3GS in order to patch up an SMS vulnerability in response to the threat’s prominent exposure at the Black Hat hacker conference in Las Vegas, NV. The researchers who discovered the vulnerability prior to the conference said they let Apple know about 30 days prior with the warning that it would demonstrated at the conference on Thursday, July 30, 2009.

It is slightly alarming to me that Apple waited to patch this until push came to shove. Perhaps they were hoping to just be able to roll the fix into OS 3.1, which is currently in private beta with developers.

When Apple rolled out the new update to OS 3.0 on Friday, it listed a sole item in the release notes: Fixes SMS vulnerability. However, I have noticed other improvements over 3.0 since installing it on my iPhone 3G.

Faster Syncing

After installing OS 3.0 in June, syncing had slipped into taking close to 4 minutes. Most of that was in the backup process. Now, backup takes less than 10 seconds.

Faster Shutdown/Startup

With iPhone OS 3.0, shutting down took nearly one minute and starting up about three minutes. Now, with 3.0.1, shutting down takes about 20 seconds and starting up about 45 seconds.

Much Improved Battery Life

I have said many times on this blog that my iPhone 3G had it’s best battery life under OS 2.2, and had dropped with 2.2.1, and then plunged to a near ridiculous level with OS 3.0. After a couple days with 3.0.1, I can say that my iPhone is at least back up to 2.2.1 levels. I no longer have to seek out a charging source every 4 or 5 hours.

Improved Wi-Fi Reception

Ever since day one with my iPhone, I have had great wi-fi signal throughout my apartment. This was quite necessary from July to November 2008, as my city did not have 3G service during those months. I noticed that immediately after updating to 3.0, I no longer could receive wi-fi signal in my bedroom nor kitchen, the two rooms farthest from my AirPort Express (about 25 feet). After installing 3.0.1, I now have full bars throughout the apartment.

So, those are a few things I have noticed. Have you noticed anything new (good or bad) with OS 3.0.1. Be sure to also say which model of iPhone you are using, as there are three flavors now.

Update: Added Improved Wi-FI Reception.