24 Hours with new iPhone Firmware

In spite of the activation woes that struck Apple & AT&T yesterday, I was able to download and install the official iPhone 2.0 Firmware to my iPhone “classic.”

After exploring the new features of the device, here are a few of the highlights:

• I have multiple email accounts setup on the phone. In your settings, you choose a default mail account to use as the “send” account when you click on links from websites. To forward a picture from my phone to a friend, I had to have a personal account set as default. To forward a link to a client, I had to have a work account as the default. With the new firmware, I can select from the message itself which account the message is coming from. For people that have both work and home addresses on the phone, this also allows you to reply using your personal account when your friend sends something to your work address.
• One of the very cool applications for the iPhone is Apple’s remote control application. From this new application you start by pairing your iPhone with iTunes, Airport Express and AppleTV on your local WiFi network. From there, you can use the phone as a remote control. The content doesn’t play through your phone, but rather its original source.
• There is now a “Contacts” application, rather than having to go through the phone application to the contacts area. And in this, you have contacts search. So when you start typing a person’s name or company name, the phone immediately shows the results. This is great if you know the company that you want to call, but cannot remember the person’s name. I’d love to see this extend to a partial phone number search as well.
• As good as web based games can be on the iPhone, native iPhone games are amazing, and there will be lots of them. The one game that all iPhone owners should get is Trism, a puzzle game similar to Bejeweled and Tetris. The twist is that you tilt the phone to slide the triangles into place. It is very addictive and this game can only be played on an iPhone.

I’m very excited about OmniFocus for the iPhone, but I want to spend some more time with it before giving it a more in depth review.

•