• Forward planning
• The back of the bus…
• Lee Evans
• Pronounce this
• Holiday
• Bygone days
• X marks the spot
• New wheels
• iPhone OS 2.1
• iTunes 8.0

• Computing
• General
• Music
• News
• Personal
• Sport
• TV and Movies

• November 2008
• October 2008
• September 2008
• August 2008
• April 2008
• March 2008

• Daring Fireball
• Gordon McLean
• Limmy

Apple released version 2.1 of the OS for iPhone yesterday, which I duly installed last night. The update promised a LOT of bug fixes, and whilst I hadn’t been experiencing the behaviour that some users were complaining of (dropped calls for example), I did occasionally have some random crashes of third party applications, and very poor response when typing SMS messages (which is what I do 90% of the time with my phone).

After installing the update, there were three things that I noticed immediately:

1. it’s a lot “snappier” to use - the Contacts application now loads almost immediately (used to be a very noticeable time lag), and the poor response in the SMS application is gone, it’s very speedy when typing now;
2. syncing with my Mac is now a LOT quicker. Backing up the phone and syncing used to take about ten minutes or so, now it takes about two minutes;
3. notification of a new incoming text message has been changed (and in my opinion, not for the good)

Let me just expand on point three a bit more. Apple have altered two things about the way your phone tells you a new text message has been received. Previously, when a new text message arrived, your phone would play your selected alert sound, and would display a visual notification. You had two choices for visual notification display: display a preview of the message on screen (along with the name of the sender); or simply display the name of the sender and the line ‘Text Message’). This was fine. I can’t imagine many people were happy to have the preview of the message showing up on the screen of their phone, so most would have used the option to go into the settings and turn off the message preview.

Using this set up, if I got a text message, my phone would make the alert sound, and I could glance at the screen and see the alert which would say that I had just received a text message and who had sent it. I was then able to decide if that was a text I had to read right then, or if I could just ignore it and continue doing whatever it was I was doing.

Now, Apple have added a couple of changes. When a new text message is received, the phone plays the alert sound. If I do nothing about this (i.e. don’t read the message), after five minutes the phone plays the alert message again. And after a further five minutes, it plays it again! In addition to this, the first time the alert is played (when the message arrives) the on-screen notification appears. However, it now simply says ‘New Text Message’. It doesn’t tell me who sent it any more. For me to know who sent me a message, I would have to turn on the message preview, which is something I don’t want.

It seems to me that these new ‘features’ that have been added to the SMS application are missing some settings; we are able to turn off the message preview, so we should also be able to turn off the audio alert repeating nonsense. And if the message preview is off, we should be given the choice of still being able to display the name of the person sending the message on the alert screen.

One final ‘feature’ Apple has added in this update has me totally baffled. If you have turned on the Passcode feature of your phone, you have to enter this passcode every time you want to use the phone. This passcode is four digits long, and can be any four digits from 0000-9999, resulting in 10,000 possible numbers. Apple has added the ability to turn on an option that will erase the entire contents of the phone if the passcode is entered incorrectly ten times in a row.

So if you did lose your iPhone and it was passcode protected, the finder would have a 0.1% chance of guessing the correct pin code and getting access to your data. That’s a pretty slim chance.

So to me, this ‘feature’ is basically a way for me to grab some unsuspecting person’s iPhone (perhaps a work colleage) and to quickly tap ‘1111′ ten times in a row when it asks me for their passcode in the hope that they’ve been stupid enough to enable this feature, and then hand back their phone which is now without data.

Crazy feature. Who came up with that one?

Comments