Sharp Tools

iPhone 2.0 firmware

Bit the bullet and ran the update on my original 8GB, mostly because I wanted to see if MobileMe and Exchange support were worth the whole deal.

The update process said it couldn't back up my iPhone, error -94 (likely because it was jailbroken). I said go ahead and nuke it. iTunes cheerfully did so, then took 15 minutes or so to run the upgrade procedure. Following that, it dutifully asked me if I wanted to configure a new phone or restore from a backup of (my phone). I told it to restore.

It synced all my metadata (contacts/calendars/etc) and then started syncing iTunes content. After about 20 more minutes, it was done, and I picked it up to have a look.

The Good:

• Exchange push email works as advertised, on EDGE or on WiFi. My work server is happily pushing emails to my phone. I can browse contacts from MobileMe and from my work Exchange server in the same lists, and can specify which to look at using the 'Categories' screen in the Contacts miniapp.
• The App Store works, downloads relatively quickly, and seems solid. Apps drop happily onto the phone. Caveat: I've only downloaded free ones so far, because I might nuke the phone again so don't want to spend money yet.

The Bad:

• There is, of course, no way to get a shell or a POSIX layer. Hence...
• No SSH.
• No VNC.
• No filesystem access.
• No patch for Safari that lets it read file:// URLS.
• Everybody with a NY Subway map app seems to want money for it, despite the fact that the map isn't theirs. I'm hoping iWalk shows back up, it was dead useful.
• A lot of the game companies seem to have inflated ideas of what an iPhone game is worth.

This sort of sucks for me, because I realized that over the past few months probably 90% of my non-phone iPhone use was reading local storage HTML format ebooks (I spend a lot of money at Baen Books' Webscriptions site. Check them out, they have a nice free library). I can no longer do this, at least until someone figures out a way for me to patch Safari to read local files and then download the files to the phone. I could of course just put it up on a webserver that I own, but then I have to have network access to read books - and most of this reading is done while commuting on the subway.

Oops.

I don't know...this might be enough of a motive to try to downgrade to 1.1.4 Jailbroken, if that's even possible. If it's not, well, I have faith that I'll be able to do all this once more - the Pwnage app sounds really promising.

I am glad I didn't spend money on a new phone. The one feature that sounds like I really want it is...drum roll...apparently there's much improved reception and call quality on the new one. Oh well.

Posted by jbz at July 13, 2008 11:43 PM | TrackBack