iPhone 2.0 Review

My life is completely digital, and as most of you would agree, it seems like I’m always looking for a new way to make my life easier. One of the most popular ways to simplify your life right now can be done by doing 2 things. First, making your life mobile: usually with small gadgets like sub-notebooks, smart-phones, PDA’s, and more. The second way is by integrating your life – keeping all of your stuff in sync. Now Apple has created a way to do this: the iPhone. The iPhone not only helps you make your life mobile, but it also intigrates it. Sure the iPhone isn’t the first to mobilize and synchronize your life, however before the iPhone it took about 3 devices to do this. This is one of the things that’s made the iPhone the successful product that it is today. Well now with the iPhone 2.0 software, they’ve managed to make that even better.

First off, you have the App Store.   This has made the iPhone into a legitimate mobile-computer. Even though the original iPhone software had tons of PDA like qualilies, the ability to add 3rd party applications really separated the two. However with this app store the iPhone has now topped PDA’s (in this aspect).   Not just because it can install apps, but the quality and power of these apps. For example normal PDA apps are usually slow, ugly, and pretty useless. So, with this in mind, the iPhone manages to pull ahead. Also, on the iPhone you have the ability to download these apps anywhere you have coverage (unless they’re bigger than 10MB then you must use wi-fi). Another thing that the majority of PDA’s can’t do. So the App Store has really helped people continue to mobilize their lives, while keeping it on one small device.

So the App Store definitely improves on the iPhone’s ability to make your work life mobile, but what about keeping it all in sync? Well, when the iPhone was originally released it would sync exactly like it does now. However, if your appointment changed or got cancelled it wouldn’t show up until your next sync. Thats why Apple imbedded push-sevices into the new software. Apple first targeted the business market by adding Microsoft Exchange support. However, Apple felt that push is something the average consumer should also have access to so they introduced Mobile Me. Mobile Me is Apple’s Dot-Mac replacement; basically what it does is give you a lot of the features you’d have with Enterprise – just on a personal level instead of a business level. It’s still $99 a year (which breaks down to like $8.25 a month – even though you pay yearly). So it will push all your contacts, calendars, and mail accounts. (Note: Mobile Me also has more features than the ones mentioned above, but they weren’t really relevant to the 2.0 review – these features will be talked about in other articles.)

Apple manages to pack in one more feature that lets you sync and mobilize your life even more: Email Attachment Support. This new feature lets you open iWork and Microsoft Power Point files. This is a great feature, because now you get to view your important work documents that you might need on the go. The only downside to this great new feature is that you can’t edit these documents. I’d love to see Apple come out with an app on the App store that’s basically like “Pages to go” so to speak (and they could easily charge about $20 for it).

Then of course Apple threw in a few extra features to make the iPhone easier to use: including mass move and delete of email, contact search, image saving (from both email and web), and a scientific calculator mode (when you rotate the phone into landscape mode). However, the last thing they did in the 2.0 update was continue to spread their horizons by adding a ton of new languages into the iPhone (you can find a full list on Apple’s site).

So in conclusion, the iPhone 2.0 update is packed full of features and a very welcome update. Are there still things that need fixed/improving? Yes. However I think that Apple definitely knows what they’re doing and how to keep improving their already great platform.

The 2.0 Update is free for all iPhone users and $10 for iPod Touch owners.

Note: I don’t want any comments saying “why do you keep saying iPhone 2.0 if its for both the touch and the iPhone?!?!” Well, Apple actually calls it the iPhone 2.0 software (even for the iPod Touch it’s called the “iPhone 2.0 software for iPod Touch”)