iPhone OS 3.0 Beta 2 Impressions
It’s iPhone all the time all around. Sure you might be tired of everything iPhone, if so this new impressions post isn’t for you. Really. There’ll be non-iPhone stuff here someday. Just not this day.
This week Apple surprised most everyone with a new beta release for 3.0. I had been expecting that they might deliver an update before June but not this quickly. I’m impressed and hoping that it means we’ll see a beta 3 and/or beta 4 heading into the WWDC in early June.
You can read over what I thought of the first beta release before continuing.
The most welcome change with the latest beta is that throughout the OS things are faster and more stable. Not quite to 2.2.1 levels but the improvement is apparent from first touch.
I’ve still had issues with Safari’s interface slowing to a crawl when JavaScript and/or video loading is involved. iTunes is still cranky at times and is quite capable of crashing. A major issue that I saw with iTunes is that it appears to not be able to load Audible books. They still sync to the phone from iTunes as normal but the audio book section of the player will not show the books for playing.
Being right in the middle of a book (The Wheel of Time) I was aghast and resorted to buying a second copy via the iTunes store and happily that one syncs/shows/plays without issue. Audible file playback/organization has always been a weak point on the iPhone and I hope that being disabled or broken right now is apart of making things better for the final release.
One other odd issue with iTunes is that sometimes content will not play in the background. Rebooting the phone fixes this and it happens rarely.
Maps, particularly directions where things were crashing, locking up and generally being unreliable have been addressed. The app is now quick to load and smooth to use.
There is still sometimes a bit of lag heading in and out of the new Spotlight search but the results appear to be faster to load.
Mail is more stable and does not suffer drastic slowdowns and freezes. But there are still issues that keep it from being as reliable as one would expect.
Application organization is still a huge pain but on the brighter side Apple appears to have added two extra pages for applications. Bringing the total installable app count up to 176.
Beta 2 also introduces some third party application instabilities. I noticed it mostly when trying to play Wolf3D. Where Beta 1 offered no issues Beta 2 causes a crash/loss of progress every time it’s played.
I’ve noticed also that updates to the base band or some low level identifier is causing problems. I’ve had issues with Blizzard’s new authenticator and BeeJive with its anti-piracy measures both being confused by new values.
Overall this update demonstrates that Apple is working very hard to release a solid update in June and despite minor annoyances and a semi daily reboot routine (reminds me fondly of the old days and Windows Mobile) things are shaping up quickly for developers diving into things like push notification.
Myself, I finally picked up a proper book in The iPhone Developers Cookbook and am looking forward to the iPhone 3.0 OS not only as an end user but for the push to finally get something of my own up in the store this summer.
