2.1 review with itunes 8 update for all

Question

I initially had addressed the international font issue that the new itunes was having. Apart from that, the addition of the genius tab along with minor improvements here and there seems to make the new itunes 8 likable.
Now, for all iphone 3G users.
I'll try my best to give you the complete review and opinions after couple of hours since the launch of the new update 2.1 .
Battery Life:
It has only been couple of hours, not even a full day yet but from what I have noticed, I say that there seems to be an improvement with the battery measure. It does not give a ridiculous full bar than a sudden decrease, it literally gradually falls. After 3 hours, the tip of the battery bar is now gone, good improvement on this.
Phone Coverage:
Rejoice. There is definite improvement on this part of the end. I am in Houston currently visiting and the place that I live in gave a poor coverage before. The bar with the 3g turned on was always moving from 1 bar to 2 bars. After the update, I am truly, on a full 5 bars most of the times with occasional drops to 4 bars. Stevey kept his word and the coverage has definitely boosted itself up.
Call quality and drop issues:
This may sound ********, but after the update, I made 10 calls to ten different people in different areas. Chatted for about 5-10 minutes with each individuals and it has been positive. No dropped calls and clear and sound communication both ways (me and the receiving party). It could be due to the fact that my area has good coverage (now, that is) but as I have mentioned above, the coverage issue has been resolved for me so I see this is a plus benefit that works out well for call quality issue as well.
Application Stability:
To pinpoint precisely, the currency converter that I had for the iphone has been not responding after the 2.0.2 update. I could not figure out whether the fault was with the phone's update or whether the application was buggy but after a solid update, this application is up and running smoothly. This is just one example. I have tested all my applications one by one to check their stability and it's all a positive check on this one.
Contacts:
The issue that had been driving me the most prior to this update.
Simply put, the contact list was S.L.O.W with the 2.0.2. There was literally a lag of 4 seconds for me everytime I turned on my contacts list.
Well, with this update now, this issue has been improved, but it is definitely NOT perfect.
The lag time has now been decreased to 1 to 1.5 seconds from what I have noticed and the scroll movement is much better now. However, I think there is still much improvement needed on this issue that still needs to be worked on.
BACK UPS:
The topic that everyone seemed to have agreed upon before is this, the amount of time it takes for the iphone to be update through sync.
Great improvement now, cutting the time it takes to update by more than half I would say.
But like all humans, don't we always want things to be faster?
I know I'm sending out a dangerous note here that will get me a lot of hate replies and evil looks from the users as well as the programmers (who I must give credit, are really working hard. thank you guys), but the backup time is still an issue.
We could definitely see further improvements in this area as well.
e-mail and text message issues:
Frankly speaking, these two topics did not cause me much trouble before. The e-mails ran fine the way it should (i have yahoo! & gmail accounts on the phone) and the text messaging ran smoothly for me before.
I guess since i did not have much of an issue on these topics, i definitely could rely on many other users for their kind inputs, reviews and suggestions.
Thank you all for taking the time to read this lengthy post,
and I hope that the new update is being a positive experience for you.
I would greatly appreciate all suggestions and discussions from the fellow iphone users on this latest update.
Regards.

Answer 1

Thanks for the great review. One of the big things I was waiting for was the addition of the ability to increase notifications for SMS messages by up to two times.
Well, Apple did implement this, just not very efficiently.
I use SMS mainly as an alternative to a pager for work. However, the iPhone just does not repeat enough times to wake me up in the middle of the night. I was hoping that with this update, I would be able to control whether or not it gave me additional notification or not. Thinking that the notifications would be back-to-back.
Here is what I have found since installing the update. The additional notifications are automatically turned on and you cannot control it. The additional notifications are not back-to-back notifications (like most other cell phones and pagers) but are instead spaced 5 minutes apart.
So, if you get an SMS and do not look at it, the iPhone will notify you again 5 minutes after the SMS was received. If you still do not look at it, the iPhone will notify you again 10 minutes after the SMS was received.
While I am glad they added this feature, I wish they had give the end-user more control over how this feature is configured.
Just my two cents worth.