Mike Puchol

iPhone 3.0 first impressions

So I went ahead, ignored all good sense, and updated my iPhone 3G to the new iPhone 3.0 Beta, released by Apple to developers a few days ago (I’m a registered developer, so I have access to the firmware).

The first two restores, which I did not choosing to configure from a 2.2.1 backup, caused the phone to become almost unusable. There were bugs everywhere, such as:

• Headphones not recognized, needing a reset.
• Failed connections to Exchange email accounts, and a few times, the complete loss of contacts and emails on the phone. Connectivity with Exchange is clunky.
• Safari text input freezing.
• Phone not allowing dialing, the keypad frozen.
• Ringtones playing back broken and with awful noises and sparks.
• Slowing down of the whole UI, needing a hard reset.
• Connection to a dock resulted in ‘Accessory not recognized’ messages (yes, I use the latest dock model).
• Screen stuck in the Search page, needing a hard reset to fix.
• All icons on the home screen disappearing, including the dock ones, needing a hard reset to fix.
• The Network options menu gets highlighted in blue for a few seconds until the options screen loads, as if the UI was frozen.
• Sometimes the headphones are not recognized when plugged in, or the phone thinks they are still connected after unplugging them, it seems the plug/unplug interrupt is getting lost somewhere, or not processed.

This afternoon I decided to restore once again, and this time setup the phone from a previous backup. Things are more or less normal so far, some of the bugs above are not happening, although I’ve not extensively tested them. This being a first beta, it leaves out some of the features announced in the keynote, mainly:

• No MMS for now. There isn’t anything special about the SMS menu other than the new icon, and copy/paste (which is awesome, with one caveat). The MMS enable/disable option is present in Settings though.
• There is no paste into Safari. For example, if you get a UPS tracking number through email, try to copy it, then paste into UPS’s tracking site loaded in Safari…nothing happens. Safari seems to just pick a block of content to copy, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to paste into form fields.
• No Notes sync that I can see in this release.
• There is zero information in the documentation about the WiFi auto-login feature. Is it WISPr? Is it some custom thing for AT&T and other partner networks? Time will tell.
• Copying a single photo by holding your finger on it doesn’t work. The popup comes up, you tap ‘Copy’, and it remains highlighted for a few seconds. There is no paste available in, for example, an email after that. You can copy/paste into an email by clicking the action button and selecting the image, then the Copy button.
• Bluetooth tether – while the iAP profile is present, and you can set it up on OS X, the connection to the phone fails. I assume there will be an OS X update to include the iPhone in the DUN devices list.

iPhone 3.0 is very promising, adding features long missed, and long present in other phones, but for now it’s not even a stable platform to develop on. Unless it’s my particular phone that is screwy of course.