iPhone 2.1 – the good, the bad, and the future

Things than improved:

• app icons don’t change positions when they are updated
• backup no longer take two hours
• podcast show a new “partially played” semi-circle icon, as well as time remaining — hooray!
• the Apple Logo of Death “too many apps for Springboard to handle” endless reboot cycle seems to have been fixed.

Things that are still bad:

• podcast chapters are not shown in the main play screen under the podcast title, just ‘chapter 14/22’.  Check out the enhanced CBC Radio 3 podcast to see why this is annoying.  Why the song title and artist?  Even the iPod does this.  And a bigger font for all titles.
• when I do go into the podcast chapter list, the only indication of the chapter is a tiny little blue triangle.  Please, please, please invert the field and text colors, and don’t make me scroll to get to it.
• still can’t click on phone numbers in calendar entries.  WTF?
• still can’t rotate Mail, yet a graphic in an email will compress text to 4 point.  Come on, guys.
• Safari still crashes regularly.  (Try loading Engadget or Gizmodo…)
• battery life with ActiveSync push is atrocious.  3-5 hours at best, thank god for Fetch + ActiveSync which gets me to at least 12 (which still isn’t acceptable compared to the Blackberry, but don’t get me started on power management…)
• Google Maps can’t handle lat/lon entries.  Thank you for the useful map of the Atlantic coast of Africa (0,0).
• speaking of Google Maps, could you at least show me coastlines / city names / major roads if I don’t have a network connection?  Showing me a green dot in the middle of a blank field is worse than no GPS at all…
• show me new mail summary on the slide-to-unlock screen like you do missed calls and SMS…
• hooking up to car stereos that have USB ports blanks the screen — are you guys NUTS?  Thank you for your two-line monocrome display and useless stereo controls and no album art and no podcasts…

This release really should have been called 2.0.1, since the background notification obviously got pulled and delayed.

New features I want:

• mail overview — let me see all mail in all accounts at once
• stream music to an Airport Express
• WiFi music sync.  Free Podcaster!
• SlingPlayer.  Oh, god, please give me SlingPlayer.  But I fear AT$T has crushed this one.  (Psst, Sling, provision me one, I won’t tell…)

Here’s to 2.2 in December.