I did it. I upgraded my iPhone 3G to the 3.0 beta 3 (thanks, Rick!). Yes, I said I wasn’t going to do it before. I know, I know. But how could I resist? Everything I was reading indicated that this beta was working really well, showing none of the lag or glitches present in the first beta. And, IT CAN DO MMS. Well, technically, anyway – I haven’t been able to send or receive any yet thanks to the exertion of absolutely no effort whatsoever on my part to get it to work.
How is it, you ask? It’s been pretty good, with only 2 noticeable glitches and one mistake made by yours truly. The first glitch is a disappearing call button in the phone’s dial pad – see the screenshot below. Re-starting the iPhone fixes that, but it somehow reverts back after a little while. I’m not the only who’s seen this – Patrick over at JAIB has as well. I’ve gotten around it by using the keypad in the GV Dialer app and then choosing to make a Direct Call from there. If I didn’t have the GV Dialer app, I think I’d be far more put off by this glitch without a way to initiate a call to someone not in my contacts list.
What’s missing from this picture?
The second glitch is some battery meter inaccuracy during charging. I noticed this when I went to charge my iPhone on Saturday after forgetting to charge it overnight on Friday. When I set it in the dock, the battery meter immediately went to full even though it was at less than 50% when I put it in, and this full reading persisted when I removed it from the dock right away. I didn’t bother re-starting it, which might have fixed this issue, and just kept charging it since I knew it needed it anyway.
The aforementioned mistake was in relation to Notes. I was inordinately excited about the ability to sync Notes between my iPhone and the notes in the Mail application on my Mac, but when I had problems syncing my iPhone, I chose an “overwrite items on this iPhone with data on my Mac” option at some point that over-wrote all my notes on my iPhone. I’m a little bummed about this since I kept ongoing shopping lists and other minutiae there. They’re saved in the back-up file made before I upgraded to 3.0, so I might try to find a way to extract them and even re-create them if I have to. Despite this, I am very happy to be able to create and edit notes on my Mac and my iPhone and have them all stay in sync with each other. Why Apple didn’t do this from the beginning I’ll never understand.
I’m also happy to report that Google Maps works flawlessly, which was a concern of mine after reading reports of it not working well in the first beta.
I know there are supposedly over 100 new features (!) in 3.0 – there’s a good list of them here – but they don’t stand out to me extraordinarily in daily use unless I think about it. I like having landscape mode available when reading and writing emails, notes, and text messages. I’ve used copy and paste, though I find I activate it often when I don’t mean to when double-tapping to zoom. NetShare still seems to work (yay!) though very slowly. I don’t use the search function much but I like that it’s now an option. I am very pleased that I can now choose to open a link in a new page in Safari.
There is one thing for which I am exceptionally grateful in 3.0 – the ability to turn off those damned repeat notifications for new text messages. I really only need one notification to let me know I’ve received a text message. The additional ones made me think I’d received another message, causing me to check and then be immediately disappointed that I’m not nearly popular enough to have received more than one at a time. Whose brilliant idea was that in the first place? I curse the engineer who thought this would be a good feature. A pox on you and yours!
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