Curious Creature

Apple promised quite a bit with the 2.1 release of the iPhone and quite frankly, as a very new user of the phone, I was hoping it was going to fix all of the issues I was having with my phone.  I’m still withing the 30 day period of being able to return it to AT&T and I’ve been pretty tempted, as cool as the phone is, to return it because it can be so damn aggravating at the same time.

I’ve had lots of application crashes (Apple-provided applications and stuff from the app store on iTunes).  I’ve had awful 3G reception.  I’ve had really awful backup times for the phone.  I can’t really complain about the battery as it has been what I’ve expected.  Could it be better? Of course but since I can keep the phone plugged in most of the day at work it really isn’t an issue for me.

In walks the 2.1 OS update and I have to say that my world has changed.  Backup times are very quick.  They were brutally slow before.  3G reception has been much improved from what I can tell in the short test I’ve been able to use it where it was an issue before (lots of apparently dead spots on my train ride into work….its always worked well at home though).  I haven’t experienced as many application crashes either.  Hoping that continues
I have to say I’ve gotta give a thumbs-up to this update.  Its been a breath of fresh air in a very troubled, yet short, relationship I’ve had with the iPhone.  Who knows…it may just rescue the phone from being banished at my house

I wanted to follow-up quickly on my other posts about the issues I was experiencing with iTunes 8 and my iPhone on Windows Vista.  The latest download  of iTunes which is still labeled 8.0.0.35, included a rolled-back driver, usbaapl.sys (1.29.0.0) which was from the 7.7 release of iTunes, seems to have fixed the problems I was having (read: couldn’t use the software with my iPhone).

More information about this whole thing from Ed Bott here.

This is ridiculous.   Did Apple not do any testing on this product before releasing it into the wild?  Other websites are also reporting issues with iTunes 8 on Vista but thankfully I haven’t been having blue screens of death on my setup.

Here is the solution Apple is providing at the moment.  Note the requirement to download a new installer.

Hoping this is going to fix the many problems I had again tonight…..

John Gruber writes that there is a fix for the insanely-slow sync of the iPhone with iTunes.  Unfortunately it only works on the  Mac
I actually tried this today before reading the article because I was getting slow syncs between the iPhone and my MacBook Pro.  I thought maybe the hub I had the phone plugged in to was USB 1.1-only (don’t remember that being the case but stranger things have happened) so I moved the USB cable directly to one of the ports on the MBP and the sync speed was far faster than via the USB hub.  I’m not sure why this would be aside from maybe the hub running at USB 1.1 speeds.

On my Windows machine at home where I have the same problem the same fix didn’t work.  Moving the cable directly to the PC didn’t result in a faster sync (and yes I have to sync with both).  I know for a fact that the USB hub on the PC is 2.0 so maybe thats the reason.