iPhone Firmware Update

For my birthday, back in early July, I received an Apple gift certificate for the exact purchase price of a shiny new version 2.0 iPhone. Since I already own the first generation iPhone and I have a tendency to avoid ridiculously long, seemingly endless lines, I haven’t picked up my present yet.  Actually, the last time I even thought about cashing in my certificate was one week after the iPhone 2.0 launch.  At the time, the nearest Apple Store had multiple rows of chairs lined up outside of the front door.  These chairs, I discovered, were reserved for folks who had previously waited in line but didn’t get to the cashier prior to the product selling out.  I guess the customers were lucky enough to receive a ticket or voucher along with the privilege to wait in line again once the next shipment arrived.  So, I wasn’t even close to getting a new phone a week after launch and I haven’t made it back to the store yet.

What I have done, however, is upgrade my firmware which took roughly as long as some of those poor folks had to wait in line outside the store.  Perhaps I am jumping ahead, but don’t attempt to upgrade unless you have time.  I’m told some upgraded are completed within 30 minutes, but I, unfortunately, have 16GB of storage space on my iPhone and I am using over 90% of it so the backup and restore of my data alone took close to an hour.  That on top of a 218MB download and the upgrade itself makes for a long firmware upgrade.

All things told, I completed the firmware upgrade because I was very interested in playing around with the AppStore and, well, I had nothing to lose.  I will say I have found the upgrade to be of little value at this point.  Yes, I now have Pandora running on my phone which is cool although the app is clunky.   I have experienced the keyboard delays and more crashes (supposedly fixed with the 2.0.1 release which I haven’t installed yet) and sadly my email pulling is far, far, far less reliable now than ever.  In fact, I find myself often times rebooting my iPhone just to resolve issues. 

When I do get around to picking up my new phone, let’s hope everything works a little more smoothly.