Apple launches iPhone 2.0.2 update - Page 5

I know, pretty bad huh! That's why in Japan they STREAM live TV, not this half backed cr$p you get like with MLB, but full TV.


We are YEARS behind that - not sure how soon 4.5 will make it but it would be nice to see 3G work where advertised - I get 1.3 -1.6MB per second, on iphone, aound 700K, not 70K, but 700K or 7000kps.


Still kills me that some people still don't get it, like a friend of mine thought his 1.5Meg speed was faster than my 1.2MB from cable.


DSL/CABLE always advertise WRONG in my opinion, like mine they calll either a 10Mb ot 16MG line, his, a 1.5Mb which all translate to 1200K to his being 150K.

Meanwhile in some places (hospital in Boston, 30MEG per second), and other countries kick our butts then again, they have been NON LAND LINES for years whereas we are just starting to get to that point.

With regard to speeds...

I like this....
http://www.speedtest.net/

When done click on summary, it shows me faster than 92% of all connections, but our country (US) at only 88% so assume this 6MB per second is up there.

The facts boost my point. If I wanted to inflate it I would have used the $1400 prices for iPhone 3G that were on eBay. I choose to use the only non-auction company I am aware of for selling 3G iPhone unlocked to the US since you can't buy them unlocked here.

Even in the US it's barely under $600 for a 16GB iPhone 3G (the only capacity the N96 comes in) after the initial price plus one month service plus early termination fee... and it's still locked to AT&T.

The SDK, while an achievement, only does the job for a limited area of apps (games and web search, essentially) that are approved and controlled not only by Apple but also the network operators (as the NetShare story attests). The bottom line is N96 would allow me to use a much wider choice of almost any apps I can download on the web (including Skype, for instance ...). The SDK is not even comparable in terms of choice, therefore.

And, by the way, you reminded me of the absolutely annoying text editor on iPhone which (by contrast to the usual T9 everywhere else) cannot be disabled ...

I'll sell you mine for mine for five thousand dollars.
How's THAT for making up stuff to boost your point?

What is the connection between the protection from hacking on the one hand, and the recent removal of the NetShare (definitely the most functional of all iPhone apps that were released by way of the SDK) on the other?

This only attest that you are extremely naïve if you think that - by way of its currently very limited third-party iPhone app environment - Apple wants to protect itself (and you) from undesirable online interference, rather than merely wants to develop a convenient monopoly.

As stated, my easily verifiable facts speak for themselves. You have tried to cloud the debate by comparing an 8GB, locked, and contracted iPhone to a 16GB, unlocked and contract-free device.

I never said ANYTHING about NetShare did I?

Wiley Miller would be proud of you......

You make good points a lot of the time, your logic is all over the place on this one.
If someone wants to quote the 199 price for a contract based phone against
a unsubsidized phone for 600 bucks, call'em on it.

Unless they are ACTUALLY IN Hong Kong, using a price quote for Hong Kong just because it sounds larger.... well that just SOUNDS like you're "reaching" to boost your point. You HAVE a good point, you didn't just try to make it.

You can't talk about how tough it is to end up with a locked phone, and compare it to prices people pay in a country where phone are locked. (for example)

199 to 600 bucks was wrong.

Saying the 199 would be 1000 if it was Hong Kong didn't make any sense.
Let's make some sense, win your point and move on.
BTW:Anyone really wants my iPhone I'll cut my price to 2500 and you can PM me with interest.

solipsism, you are definitely right.

I didn't even want to go into the ignorance of an argument that N96 is in a different price league from iPhone.

Hence, you provided your reply ... This was just to respond to your last statement:

YES, an increased - albeit not total - openness of the operating platform is among benchmarks (but not the sole one) whereby I would measure how good is a given smartphone.

Since I loaded 2.0.2 Cannon Challenge no longer works - at least not for me ?

I understand.
There will always be people that will value the ability of that Nokia phone to run Skype for you(your example), over a real web browsing experience.
I think the major point for me is that the iPhone is not meant to take people
with high end smart phones already and convert them to the iPhone.
It's not meant to take people that have specific apps like Skype and convert them
at the expense of Apple's relationship with certain carriers.
It's meant to take consumers that have not seen smartphones as being very interesting
or easy to use, and move them to purchase.
Obviously trying to convert current smartphone users to the iPhone would be
going for the minority of phone users and not very smart.

Enjoy Skype.
(*Enjoyed your comment that the iPhone SDK is just for games and stuff*)

Lets examine what hittjr01 stated. There was a lot more to the post and much of it I would disagree with but a lot of it depends on one POV so I'll only rehash what I've already quoted.


First of all, the price he lists of $199 is for an 8GB iPhone, yet the N96's lowest capacity is 16GB. This isn't much of a fault except that he clearly states that they are same storage capacity. This is a verifiable fact.

The next thing is the price. Even using the same capacity the iPhone is only $300 for when you don't consider the contract involved. This is a verifiable fact.

If you want to cancel your account after the first month the price is about $550, but it's still locked to AT&T. This is a verifiable fact.

The cheapest unlocked iPhone 3G I saw was for $1000 on Engadget but that turns out to be incorrect. If you go to the site the '3G' is replaced by 'Original' in the image, but not in the title. With the links provided, this is a verifiable fact.

I had no need to use the highest price I saw of which was $1400 on eBay because $1000 was high enough and I figure the eBay prices have gone down since I was last monitoring the sales. Your hyperboolic comment about selling your iPhone for $5000 makes no sense as it's about the device can sell for not what you are willing to sell it for. The current eBay listinga have prices that show that around $1000 is probably the going rate for a new, unlocked, 16GB iPhone 3G. With the link provided, you can verify this for yourself.

Now this I can agree with!

PS: You could use Skype on a Jailbroken iPhone prior to the v2.0 update. I'm not sure if they've ported it. If Skype actually creates an app for the iPhone (and I think they will) it will only be allowed to be used over WiFi as one would expect with the carrier relationships with Apple.

Agreed.
But if people want to "rate" one smartphone against another on the basis of the ability of a developer to build anything they want (a Skype clone) and distribute no matter what onto any carrier using that handset, well those people can just go buy any phone they want and ignore the iPhone. There are not enough of those kind of people to matter at ALL in the sales of iPhones or any other handset for that matter.

There may be all kinds of apps like Skype, that "the community" out there will find a way to get onto an iPhone. Expecting Apple to facilitate or cooperate with those people against the interests of the carriers that Apple works with is silly.

Again, "the people that actually think that" won't make the silliest little dent in Iphone sales.... just buy the Nokia and quiet bitching about it.

There will be a lot of smarter phones out there.
There will be a lot of ways to distinguish one from another.
Saying that the iPhone can't do a lot of specific purpose things that others
can do will be true. (depending on actually picking things that are fact and not making
stuff up!) It will also be true that some phones will be cheaper.

The iPhone is trying to put the best internet screen size, clarity, and browsing actions
into the hands fo non-smartphone users to bring them in and make the tent bigger.

The is one way the iPhone is better than any smartphone bar none.
It will attract more non-smartphone users to the market segment than any other handset.

Advanced Smartphone users need to stop complaining and just deal with it......

An element that is being left out of this comparison of the iPhone and other platforms. These other mobile platforms are coming to 10 years old. It took years to develop them to the point were they are now.

The iPhone is an entirely new platform that is a year old. Apple is adding to it step by step like everyone else has had to do.

There seems to be some expectation that Apple should be able to launch a new phone that immediately does everything every other phone is capable of doing with no bugs or problems.

This is a feat no one else has been able to perform.

From what I've heard a lot of Apps are waiting for Apple to solidify the API's needed for them to work. Seeing as their are no native VOIP apps, I imagine they are also waiting.

Besides attracting previously non-smartphone users to the iPhone the "smartphones are only for geeks or hardcore business users" moniker has been lifted so it's very existence is increasing other smartphone sales.

As for other smartphone users complaining about the iPhone not offering what they need, that is fine as it's not meant to fit everyone's needs. But they aren't looking at the big picture. How the other companies are getting off their asses to create a better product to compete against the iPhone. All smartphone users should be glad that the iPhone has entered the market and set a fire under their favourite smartphone manufacturer.

Nokia has publicly admitted to have a poor user interface and bought a Spanish company earlier this year to assist with this. I think that is what they bought them for. They are also working with Mozilla to provide FF for their handsets. I wish they would go with Webkit since it's a better mobile engine but I understand their desire to set themselves apart from Safari. RiM is coming out with physical keyboard-less phone. Who would have though that would ever happen 2 years ago?

Agreed.
Two years ago, a LOT OF PEOPLE said Apple had no chance against such a market leader as Motorola!

The iPhone is a game changer, and there is plenty of room for other smart phones.
And as you said, the amount of room that there is, is much larger because the
market was greatly enlarged.

Forigve me for my comment, I was thinking of the N95. You are correct, the N96 is 16GB, but the 16GB iPhone is still only 299. I understand the point between locked and unlocked phones, but regardless, you're still going to have to get some kind of phone service, whether in Hong Kong, United States, or anywhere else. You also have to realize the phone market is much different in the US, phones are locked to specific carriers, whereas most phones overseas are not. Also, here in the US, AT&T would be my best option for a GSM phone anyway, because T-Mobile's US network is absolutely horrid, so being locked to AT&T is not an issue. So, as was my original point, here in the US, I would rather buy an iPhone for 300 bucks than get an N96 for twice that and have to type away on T9 or triple tap on each key if I don't want the word prediction, which quite frankly, the iPhone is brilliant at.

Let me start off by saying that I have owned both iPhones and would not trade it for an Nokia smartphone any day. Mainly because it's Safari that I use most and now other smartphone compares.

If you want an iPhone in the US there really is no reason care if it's unlocked or locked if you plan on staying in the States. Unfortunately, I do travel often and I'm stilling waiting for my 3G unlock before I hit London, Dubai andKuala Lumpur in Sept/Oct. If not, then I'll just use it as an iPod but having a prepaid data package would be nice for getting around town. My TomTom will work in GB but I'd rather not bring it with me. I'm not sure how thorough the Google Maps are on the iPhone for those other cities but I assume they are better than the TomTom.

I have heard that people can get lower package plans from AT&T if they pay their early termination fee. This would have to save you more than $7.60/month ($175 ÷ 23 months) to be a viable option.

I installed the 2.0.2 upgrade with no difficulty. However, now my Edge barely loads anything at all; the time lag when I turn on 3G is much, much longer; my accelerator problems are the same as before. Basically, yesterday I was very, very happy except for accelerator problems and poor battery life. Today I am unhappy with many more things.

Just a thought? Having your Gmail address as part of your sign-on is probably not a wise thing to do.

Unless, of course, the object is to see how much spam you receive.

I KNOW! I haven't been able to figure out how to change this!!!

Apple/exclusive carrier will not allow a Skype app to go through. I can see it happening though when the iPhone distribution chain is relaxed from the current exclusive one to include more providers.

Well.....

Updated last night to 2.0.2. So far, I have seen NO improvements. After the update and re-syncing, it took about an hour and 10 minutes to back up(and I have about 7.8 GB of space available). An hour and 10 minutes!!!!!
Still have the same email connectivity issue for all of my accounts. Every so often, I have to toggle the power off and on for it to finally connect with my mail accounts. I have to do this a number of times throughout the day. It just seems to stop connecting and requires a power off\\on to correct it - - for a little bit - -until it happens again. Very annoying!!

I have noticed a serious decrease in battery life.

Now, I finally got it down to a science to get me through the day with battery management. Turn location services off while at work; bluetooth is always off unless I need it; WiFi is off unless I am at home; screen brightness is always set to about 1/4 of max. When driving, I connect my charger. It has been pretty good for the past few weeks. I am not a heavy user of data or voice during the day (except for checking email) but I do listen to music throughout the day. Night time I typically use the browser with Wifi.

Since the update to 2.0.2, I can almost see the battery charge run down as I am looking at the bar. Okay, maybe that's a stretch, but it absolutely has gone from manageable to almost not acceptable.

I'll keep everyone posted!

I think you're getting somewhat off the mark there. As I understand, this is not a forum for Apple salesmen to wank over themselves as to how good they are at marketing - this is, first and foremost, a forum for simple consumers (regardless what kind of consumers) of Apple products to share their individual experiences, grievances and suggestions with a view to seeing those products improved.

Once you have registered as a given user name, I don't think you can change it. You may just have to start over with a new user name and let this one go.

I think it's entirely likely that the iPhone 3G, at this early stage of the game, does have more dropped calls and other problems than the other handsets that have been in the game much longer. Or maybe the users of other phones don't have forums like this to air their problems on. I don't know. There is one meme I've seen repeatedly on here, though, that I think needs to be corrected.

Several posters have said something like: "I live in (pick a big city) so it can't be lack of coverage." The downtown areas of big cities are the absolute worst spot for any kind of radio reception, and as the frequency goes up, the problem gets worse. Verizon thinks all these misappropriated TV channels it just bought will help, but they're wrong. There's a reason why those top UHF channels weren't in use in most markets, and that's because if you had anything between you and the TV station, you were going to have serious reception problems. Most cellphones use frequencies that are 2 or 3 times higher yet, and so heavily built-up areas are a desperate problem.

To make matters worse, the first network in any given city is bound to have snapped up the best tower sites, and anyone else coming in later (like AT&T) is going to have to settle for second-best spots that are going to be shadowed from some points by buildings. So comparisons really only work if both phones are in the same place and both using AT&T. I've seen enough reports to be reasonably sure that the iPhone's reception problems are real (that is, can be ascribed to the phone rather than the network,) but I have no idea what percentage of phones are affected. Maybe if people who have no problems posted at the same rate as people who do, we could find out, but that's never going to happen, so airing our problems is important. Just please don't assume yours are universal, and that anybody who doesn't have any problems and says so, is a deluded fanboy, or an Apple salesman.

Let's work together, instead of screaming at each other.

I can attest to this. My wife now has a Blackberry Curve because we switched to AT&T to get an iPhone for me.


Exactly.


I have been waiting for several years for a reasonably priced device that would combine phone, PDA, and iPod. I really didn't anticipate using the device for web browsing and e-mail, but the iPhone implementation (IMO) is really terrific. I'm hooked.

no question the 3G iPhone has got bugs - more than it should.

will they get fixed in the next few months? sure.

is it good for Steve Jobs to eat some humble pie? definitely! too much worship is bad for anyone.

is the situation worth all the emotion in this thread? well, it's understandable - so i'm not criticizing - but actually, no. this is cutting-edge stuff, and if you are an early adopter, you have to be ready to roll with the glitches, not freak or get all righteous.

what about me? (it's all about me, right?) i got a cheap 4Gig 2G last year that has had no problems. the new apps are great. so i'm a happy camper.

I finally did the update. My jailbreak is gone but that should be rectified in a day or two.

The signal strength seems a little better but it's well within the normal variance so I can't make a determination. I'd assume that there would have been very little to nothing Apple could do to have 3G issues with this update.

Typing in Safari seems snappier, but it was that way too with the v2.0.1 update too. It'll probably be a couple days of using Safari before any typing issues and crashes appear.


.......................v2.0.1..............................................v2.0.2

Finally some level of confirmation to my hypothesis that the iPhone is good for the overall cellphone market. It wasn't mentioned specifically in the article but I think that the higher priced, feature rich phones will encourage people to keep their handsets longer than when they cheap throwaway phones.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...in-the-us.html

Yes point 4 is particularly surprising. Apple must be working on a major update to address some of these omissions (also To-Do syncing with Mail being absent).

I'm not complaining though, because I know Apple can and does update it's software regularly. For my previous Nokia phone, I NEVER updated the firmware/software even though there were updates available because you had to buy a stupid proprietary USB cable to do it and updates weren't supported wirelessly over BlueTooth 2. This thing is already a god-send for me even if they don't fix anything.

1) I don't under point 4. There are Mac apps that do it and you can alter and add contacts on the iPhone.

2) The To-Do/Notes thing is very odd to me. I thought this would have been added when Leopard Mail was given Notes and To-Do access. My MM syncing stores them on the server, but doesn't sync to anything else but another Mac and I think that is only if I need to restore my system.

My iPhone now experiences just as many dropped calls, and just as much static during calls. I have never experienced the 3G/EDGE switching issue that I know of, so I can’t speak to that. But the greatest annoyance? My iPhone’s iPod no longer shuffles songs. Dapping next or double-clicking the fob will shuffle randomly, but if I do nothing, once the song reaches the end, it just goes back to the beginning and stays in an endless loop.

Has anyone else experienced this??

I assume you're saying you get 6 megaBYTES/second, meaning a 48Mbps connection? That's a nice speed. I have about 8Mbps (in Australia) which is ample (for now), but I've enjoyed the use of very high speed connections.


I think Morluk was complaining that if you weren't subscribed with your provider to have caller ID, then the iPhone didn't show the caller ID. This makes no sense as a complaint against the iPhone but that's all I can think of - caller ID certainly works fine on the iPhone.

Definitely has some software bugs and reception quality which must be addressed.

In terms of the platform openness and basic functionalities - I think that's what we get with Apple. They redefine what a platform can do, and at a basic level they make it easier to use but with fewer functions. They break the mold of how we do what we do and replace it with a better one, from which they can then build. Sometimes they do remove (or don't provide) things that could have easily been left and I find that disappointing - which is why I'm very glad they're not the only game in town, just a game that has a significantly different approach to the others.

Long live competition
ps. Keep buying the phone that works best for you.

I am somewhat doubtful that the update fixed the lag. It is just the fact that you rebooted your phone and all of the caches cleared that did it. When I updated to 2.0.1, it was much faster...then a few days later, it was slow again.

OK THEN...

The only semi reliable handsets nokia puts out are the NON smartphones. All of the issues we have are with their symbian based handsets which are complete crap. Sony fairs better with their handsets as they implement the OS better and their handsets are less buggy.

The N95 is a popular handset but I have 16 of them in the workshop which are all faulty and all only a couple of months old.

Problems range from

Bluetooth wont connect
mic doesnt work
earpiece wont work
slider broken or slider loose
dead keys
no signal
weak signal, drops calls constantly.
audio cut outs
terrible battery life (<90 mins)
no sim card message
power issues, e.g. turning off when answering incoming calls

Of course, there are a multitude of software issues too but these can normally be fixed by switching the handset off and on again.

Even though Nokia has done their best to squash the bugs even the newest 8GB handsets still have signal issues and power problems and thats after dozens of firmware updates.

Anyone who deals with mobiles is well aware of Nokias history with symbian. The N70, N73, N90 were all plagued with bugs.

The top end segment? Far from it.