It took a few hours but I finally got through to the authentication servers to update my iPhone to the 3.0 firmware. The process took about 15 minutes total and went without a hitch.
The first thing that I noticed when starting up was the new Voice Memos icon on my home screen. I have been using Evernote for text and voice memos for a while now so I am not quite sure how useable this will be for me. The only advantage I can see that it has over Evernote is that Evernote limits you to a 5 minutes for your voice notes while the new native app seems to have no limit. You can pause your voice note and then email it when you are done where I suppose you could add text notes to it as well. We will have to see if it gets used.
The next thing that I checked out was the app store to see if there were any updates for any of my apps. I know that the WordPress iPhone app version 3.0 has been submitted to the app store but unfortunately did not show up. What did show up were updates to Evernote, Showtimes, and Enigmo. I selected to update them all and they seemed to get stuck on my menu page with all three apps saying “Installing”. After several minutes of waiting for this to clear itself I went back into the app store and then was presented with a message that I had to agree to the new Terms of Service for the app store. That took another couple minutes and then my apps were updating. Note – The Evernote update is awesome – lots of cool new stuff.
From there I decided to check out how the camera was doing since I heard that there were updates there. Sure enough my camera started up much quicker and when I pressed the shutter button it actually took the picture right then as opposed to waiting a second or two! Also the pictures seems to be clearer but the true test will be when I try to snap some pics of the kids later on (Kids are true test of any camera!).
I then decided to see how Safari was doing with its updates. It seemed to be snapper which was nice. While browsing a page I remembered that copy and past was available and decided to try it out. It was actually much easier to use then I had anticipated. I easily selected a paragraph of text and then brought it over to my notepad and pasted it. After that I went back to Safari and coped a URL and successfully pasted inside on my WordPress app. It wasn’t even their new version and it worked! Awesome.
Finally I checked out the Spotlight search function but could not think of anything to search for. I am sure it will come in handy down the road.
All-in-all I would say that the iPhone 3.0 firmware is great, especially for being free. I am still planning on upgrading to the 3GS in the next month or so though. The main reason is for the video camera. I will be checking it out at the Apple store when it comes out to make sure that it is good quality and then hopefully scoop one up for my birthday.
Great job Apple! Just buy a new activation server though please…