Just in case, I waited until the end of the week to install the new software on my iPhone 3G (no S).  Luckily, the process took a long time but it was pretty uneventful and I didn't have to throw my iPhone against the wall or anything like that.  On the other hand, I've been putting it through its paces this morning and by now I am not as impressed or excited about this new release as I was on Fri when I started the installation.

The title promised you adventure and drama, so here it is in the form of an installation log,

The Morning After

Today, Saturday, I've been trying different things out and most seem to work as advertised.  But there have been some disappointments, too.

iPod

I was very happy to discover, all on my own, that the iPod now lets you scrub the music "head."  In other words, you can grab the white round button on the progress bar and move it back and forth a few seconds at a time (the old behavior) or in much finer increments.  You change the scrubbing by sliding your finger down while holding the progress bar button.  Cool.

There's also a 30 second rewind button under the progress bar.  Very cool.

Cut-and-Paste et al

Cut-and-paste, of course, was the big thing for me.  Works great.

In Safari, you can hold down a URL and a pop up will come up to give you the option of opening in a different page or copy it (to paste on a Twitter client or an email, for example).

Addendum

Maybe it's been there all along, but I just noticed that in the Calendar app, when you're looking at an Event, it shows the list of Invitees and whether or not they've responded and if they have, whether or not they accepted the invite.  Pretty nice.

Little Disappointments

Tethering and MMS don't work in the US thanks to AT&T.  These are "little" disappointments only because I had very low expectations given that these features depended on AT&T doing something right.

As @mollydotcom said earlier today,

@azlee I believe any derivation of the words "function" and the brand "AT&T" are no longer grammatically allowed to be in the same sentence.

'Nough said.

Search, the Big Disappointments (Sob)

My biggest disappointment has been the search feature.  You still cannot find contacts by looking up their number or email or anything else other than their Name and Company.  That is so lame, so lame.

Another search bug has to do with mail.  Whenever I search for just about anything, I find lots and lots of hits in EMAILS THAT HAVE LONG BEEN DELETED.  I even removed and recreated the email accounts, hoping that would solve the problem but it didn't.  It did forget the very old, long removed emails but it immediately started to accumulate pointers to new emails even after I removed them.  This makes the search feature for email barely useful.  In fact, as I started receiving (and removing emails) the list will become so long as to become useless.

I looked around and did not find any way to flush its index manually (other than removing the accounts).  If you do know of a workaround for this, please (PLEASE) let me know.

Conclusions

I still think that iPhone kicks ass and Apple, in general, is leading the industry forward.  For now.

Not that long ago I stayed away from any company whose business plan depended on making money on mobile phones.  The reason was simple: as opposed to the Internet, mobile phones operate on private networks and the network operators showed no interest in doing anything other than squeeze every penny out of its users (just the other "industry" that has "users").

Now, we are happily working with companies that are either creating iPhone clients for their existing products or new apps, native to the iPhone.

What's made the difference is Apple.  They created such a force around the iPhone that they've been able to break the mold and force AT&T to "think different" (or, at least, behave a little differently).  This is good for AT&T and even better for the mobile industry, but they don't seem to have figured it out, yet.

And One More Thing

As I said above, I think that Apple is leading the industry forward, for now.  But don't disregard Android.  We're not.  Even though we don't yet have a client paying us to do it, we're building our own Android applications to gain experience and build a reusable platform.

There's more than an even chance that history will repeat itself.  Like the Mac and the PC, Android could very well overtake the iPhone in sheer volume in the near future.  Other manufacturers are not going to sit on the sidelines and let Apple take it all.  A bunch of them will jump into the fray with crazy ass ideas, laughable designs and clunky user experience.  At first.  But eventually a few will stick.  And they will always have the cost advantage and will appeal to many more users based solely on that.

It's hard to tell at this point if Apple has learned anything from history.  Will they stay competitive?  will they create lower cost, entry level devices?  or will they stick to their "you have to buy on our terms because we're cool and they're not" approach?

More importantly, will Apple license their software to other vendors, say, HP or even Dell?  Like Apple, these are big companies now and they would not undercut Apple by much (they need big margins, too).  In exchange, Apple could create an sphere of influence that would keep them in the lead for many, many years. These companies, together, could easily fend off any onslaught of newcomers.

And, more importantly, they could keep Microsoft from ever getting a foothold in this space.

As I said, time will tell if Apple has learned anything from history or if it's doomed to repeat it.