“After what were surely a few extra pots of coffee last night, Apple released iPhone OS 2.2, the latest update to its operating system for the iPhone and iPod touch. As with the 2.1 update just over two months ago, Apple administered a healthy dose of new features and fixes throughout the OS and a handful of applications, many of which we saw previewed over the last couple months. Let’s take a look at the most significant changes, some appreciated polish, and recap what’s still missing.”
Update installed, nothing notable outside of reported changes. App Store has received lots of love, which is good. Home key shortcut is great. Hopefully Safari is more stable and dropped calls do down.
Still pissed about MMS.
Still no Flash player?
Of course. No Flash, no MMS, no copy & paste, no A2DP, no voice recognition, no video.
I kind of expect a fancyphone to be able to do MMS, at least.
Copy&Paste would be the most required feature, it’s a smart phone should be able to do a dumb task like Copy&Paste.
Flash many website have flash content, whats the use of having such an advanced browser when it cannot render one of the most popular media contents of the web.
I never use voice recognition facility on my cellphone but I think it’s a very important feature.
I am not putting Apple down here, if I buy a computer/laptop it has to be a mac, if I have to buy an mp3 player only an iPod for me. So when I buy a cell phone I would hod on to my Motorola till these features are available on the iPhone.
Flash is a bloated pig. Most flash implementations are slow and chew cpu as if they were computing seismic geological data instead of animation. My old powerbook 1.25Ghz would barely work with flash video H.264. Every other codec works flawlessly, DIVX, Mpeg4 etc on the powerbook except for flv. I can’t imagine what flash would do to battery life and performance of the phone if it were like the desktop implementations. I run flashblock on firefox to get rid of all the ridiculous flash that permeates the browsing experience today and only enable the flash I want to watch.
The phone only has 128MB ram and already struggles. Not matter how good the iPhone hardware is it is still a phone not a netbook. The N800 supports flash but performance blows chunks.
Don’t get me wrong I would like having flash for those stupid websites that only support flash. But flash for mobile really needs to become a much better piece of software for it to be useable day to day. Hope Adobe wises up to that fact.
Edited 2008-11-22 20:22 UTC
Something I’ve been wondering about is the name. Is it officially referred to as iPhone OS and not something like Mac OS X iPhone?
It’s actually called “iPhone OS.” For a long time, it was only referred to as “OS X,” but when the SDK came out, it became “iPhone OS”
The API set is called Cocoa Touch, but I understand it’s actually just minified Cocoa + special touch methods.
It’s a subset of Cocoa with specific functionality unique to the iPhone platform.
iPhone is more of a multimedia phone than it is a smartphone. Wonder why Google is rolling out all these nice features on iphone ahead of it’s own platform(android). I understand the desire for them to have all these apps on various devices but cmon Google..how about some android love?
I read this as OS/2 2.1 for iPhone released.
That would be very weird.
I had too see if there was any improvement in Safari, and though my testing hasn’t been exhaustive yet (or even close), it does seem a lot quicker.
I have Safari on the iMac here through wireless, which would load pages many times faster than Safari on the iPhone with the same network. I understand that rendering speeds will be an issue, but I couldn’t see why it was that much slower…
Anyway, it is still a lot slower under 2.2, but “feels” faster than 2.1. It’s getting closer to being usable now… Seems a lot nicer to use too…
(don’t you love comments with vague words like “feels” and “seems” etc 🙂
The hardware in your iMac is much more powerful, that’s why it’s faster. Hop on an old 400mhz PC and modern web pages will render very slowly as well.
Google Street View isn’t available to Canadians. Hopefully we’ll at least have access to this for major Canadian cities before the end of 2009. I’m disappointed Apple wasn’t able to provide landscape mode for typing email and SMS. As well I still don’t have the ability to send a vCard from the Contacts list without the use of a third party app. There’s also no A2DP which would be useful instead of jogging, snowboarding, etc with a wired headset. I was even hoping for the ability to sync notes with Leopard or edit documents but that’s a no show for this update. I really dislike the way Safari now looks with a cramped search field next to the URL field. While this makes sense on the desktop it doesn’t on a mobile device such as the iPhone. Safari no longer feels user friendly. Though at least for now Safari hasn’t crashed on me. I would of also liked to see my photos in their listed events as seen in iPhoto instead of all jumbled together in one mess. The camera still has no ability to zoom, use light settings or even have a timed camera shutter release. I also still can’t do video recording. Both of these features are available to jailbroken iPhones and reason why I’ll continue to jailbreak. Though why should we need to? Apple, where the hell is MMS? This has been available for quite some time on even the most basic of cellphones including highend smartphones with the exception of the iPhone. While I’m usually a fan of Apple products I must say compared to the competition (ie: RIM, HTC, etc) I’m starting to lose faith in Apple. In that they won’t actually provide features that their competitors already offer consumers with their smartphones such as the RIM Blackberry Bold, HTC Touch Pro and Sony Ericsson Xperia. Though I’m sure they’ll find a new way to mislead consumers into believing the next iPhone will offer these features as they did with the original iPhone customers. All in one device my ass…rolls eyes. Sorry I think I just blew a gasket
Given Rogers’ pricing for data transfer, that’s probably a good thing.
I needed to send some info to my friend. It was 4 quite long sentences in a book, way too much for a SMS, so I did the simplest action that came to my mind: I took my 2-years old Sony Ericsson K 750 from the pocket, took a picture with it and sent a MMS to him.
He phoned me two minutes later: “sorry, send me the text by e-mail, I cannot read your message, I have just changed my old Nokia for a brand new f..g iPhone”.
Hmmm…
A.
I’m not a phone person. I personally detest cell phones, and just replaced my dead Nokia 6010 with… nothing. And haven’t looked back. But even from my rather non-demanding position, if what you say is true, I would have to conclude that the iPhone is the phone for people with more money than sense.
I’d argue that point, but I’m too busy wallowing in shame as I continue loading my phone with flashlights, lighters and every other pointless app I can find…
; )
Edited 2008-11-23 21:51 UTC
Why because sane people pay large sums of money to send a few pictures across a protocol that was designed to make more money for the phone companies, instead of using some thing free like email?
I have owned numerous phones with MMS and Cameras and have never once sent or received a MMS message. I surely must be insane and know only insane people.
Edited 2008-11-24 07:28 UTC
I bought the iPhone because it has hands down the best mobile browser. I’ve probably received two MMS messages in my life and they were both stupid chain mail things, so I don’t really care.
No copy & paste is annoying and I don’t miss flash (although it is frustrating when a site requires flash).