By Julian Prokaza on Friday, 12 September 2008
 Apple has posted the new 2.1 firmware update for 2G and 3G iPhones, following its announcement at the “Let’s Rock ” event on Tuesday. The update is only available through the new iTunes 8, via the usual ‘Check for Update’ button on the iPhone screen.
Apple has listed a dozen improvements that the 2.1 firmware “includes”, most notably “significantly better battery life”. Given that just about every iPhone 3G owner has moaned about the battery life, it’ll be interesting to see just how the new firmware fares on this front. More details after the cut.
Another interesting additional is the nod towards better security with the option to erase the iPhone’s data after ten failed attempts to enter the passcode. Apple has also closed the security loophole that allowed the iPhone Favorites to be accessed by bypassing the passcode.
We’re rather less impressed by the “Repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages” though, and we'd much rather have an optional indefinite alert. Notifications repeat after five and 10 minutes, then that's your lot.
The Genius auto-playlist creator works in a similar way to the iTunes 8 tool, though only with tracks stored on the iPhone. You'll need to sync the iPhone with iTunes after the firmware update for Genius to appear, after which you'll find it as a new playlist entry. You can also access it when playing a track by tapping the album artwork, then the Genius icon below the playback indicator bar.
  
Backups are dramatically faster with 2.1. On our iPhone 2G with 20 or so applications installed, the backup iTunes made before the update took the best part of 20 minutes. A full backup made after the firmware update (with the previous backup deleted) took just over four minutes.
The Settings for Safari also has a new option for 'Databases. This shows the amount of storage used by Google Translate on our iPhone, so it appears to be just a more granular information screen for certain web applications.
  
The EDGE status bar icon has also undergone a cosmetic change, and also appears to have had an accuracy tweak. At least we assume so, since the previously strong EDGE signal we had in the Mobile Computer office has changed to a non-existent EDGE signal, post-update...
It's not all good news though, and Apple also appears to have removed the extremely useful ability to take a screenshot by pressing the iPhone's Home and Power buttons simultaneously.
And no, a copy and paste function still hasn't been added.
Here’s the lowdown on some of what the 2.1 firmware fixes, according to Apple:
- Decrease in call set-up failures and dropped calls
- Significantly better battery life for most users
- Dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes
- Improved email reliability, notably fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts
- Faster installation of 3rd party applications
- Fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes for users with lots of third party applications
- Improved performance in text messaging
- Faster loading and searching of contacts
- Improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display
- Repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages
- Option to wipe data after ten failed passcode attempts
- Genius playlist creation
Lets us know how you get on with the 2.1 update in the comments.
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