If you own an iPhone 3G, the most insanely great news at Tuesday’s Apple event might not have involved the new Nano or Touch or iTunes 8. Instead, you might have been most excited by the news that the iPhone 2.1 software update was imminent. Just rereading what Steve Jobs said (via Daring Fireball), I find my pulse is racing a bit:
“2.1 software update is a big update. It fixes lots of bugs. You’ll get fewer call drops. You will get significantly improved battery life, for most customers. We have fixed a lot of bugs where if you have a lot of apps on the phone, you’re not going to get some of the crashes and other things that we’ve seen. Backing up to iTunes is dramatically faster. And so just a lot of bugs have been fixed.”
As promised, the update is now available–if you’ve got an iPhone, plug it into and use iTunes to check for an update. Apple has caught a lot of flack lately for vague release notes on updates (“bug fixes”); it may have been listening to the gripes, since the list of fixes you see before installing 2.1 is long, specific, and nifty:
That encompasses most of the quirks I’ve encountered with my iPhone 3G, and I’ll be happy to have Genius playlists available right on the phone. And I figure that once Apple’s squashed the biggest bugs, it can devote most of its time to adding new stuff that the iPhone clearly needs, such as cut-and-paste and synching of iCal and Outlook to-do lists.
I’m downloading and installing 2.1 right now, and if I have anything to say about, I will. But I figure that if the update does its job, it’ll be kind of hard to review–I’ll just notice over time that my iPhone has stopped doing all the things that made up the hate half of the love-hate relationship I’ve had with it. (Actually, there’s one formal test I know I want to do–there’s a hotel lobby in downtown San Francisco where my iPhone drops every single call I make. If that problem goes away, I’ll consider iPhone software 2.1 a miracle cure.)
If you install the update, lemme know what you think…
Paradoxical but true: The iPhone is both the most highly evolved mobile platform ever and one that’s remarkably rudimentary in some major ways. What’s good about it is so good that I sometimes forget that. But every time I do, something happens to remind me of the things it still can’t do, and of how little we know of Apple’s road map for the phone and its software.
It’s really tough to review any application or service that relates to musical tastes: The kind of music you like is intensely personal, and it can have a huge impact on how pleased you are with a product. Please bear that in mind as you read my initial impressions of 
For the first time in a while, I’m not at an Apple product-launch event–I’m at DEMO in San Francisco today, so I’ll miss “Let’s Rock” in San Francisco. (Which probably means it’ll be an especially good one…the last one I missed was the original iPhone launch at Macworld Expo 2007.)
I’m telling you, I’ve given up trying to predict what Apple will announce at its press events, such as 
Dan Lyons, who used to be best known as 
I remember when I cared about the fall TV season–really, really cared about it. Today, I couldn’t give you the name of a single new show. But I’m still intrigued by Hulu getting in on the action.