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If you own any of the family of iPhones or touch’s, then you will have already downloaded or made plans to download the new OS version.

Other blogs will have more information about the special features and what to expect, or simply how to enable features that your carrier supports.

If your a customer of AT&T, tethering and mms will be delayed for technical reasons regarding mms, a block has to be removed. Tethering is more of a billing problem, unlike using a rocket stick or a pmcia card, your not using any more data than you would by using safari in the iPhone, however AT$T wants to price it with a data plan for more money, the only thing that I would say in their defense is that they at least were more or less upfront with that, I would be surprised if more carriers did not do the same thing or at least have plans for it.

Now on to the upgrade itself.

In a word it was horrible.

When you visit cellphone or technical blogs and forums, a lot of what you hear is going to be rumor and happenstance, with a few nuggets of real information.

Anyways one of these bits of information was that the upgrade was going to go live at midnight pacific time on the seventeenth, which would make it 3 am on the east coast. That never happened, so I waited like everyone else for 1pm eastern.

It was actually 1:11 when iTunes finally decided that, no, 2.1 was not the actual up to date software and would I Ike to update. Duh, click yes. Up to this time, everything had gone well, the software had been downloading and I was about to start the actual update process, when everything came off the rails.

My iPhone would not back up to the computer , the new OS was sitting on my hardrive with no way of manually installing it. Apples help , diagnostics and google were simply of no help in diagnosing the problem and any kind of solution.

I did have one option, the nuke and pave method, which eventually got invoked, but I wanted to avoid that till I had no other alternative. Changed USB ports, tried a different computer and cable, all to no avail. The iPhone would sync with my laptop, which ruled out the cable. I was faced with the possibility that something was corrupted and finally hit the restore button.

In good conscience I can’t blame apple for this predicament, in truth I had known about this problem for several weeks and did not believe that it would stop an upgrade in it’s tracks.

Since the iPhone had no problem syncing, all I had really lost were my notes and Internet settings for wifi. I think what really hurt was the notes, it never really dawned on me that a native app for the iPhone would not sync, it’s a greyed out area in iTunes.

So far the only new item that I have not tried is tethering, for Rogers customers it’s supported at the moment. Look in settings/general/network about two thirds of the way down, to enable it.

Bluetooth, more or less was a snap, I just had to remember how to set the headphones to seek other devices and the iPhone paired them instantly. From there I went to the iPod setting and picked a song at random, stereo Bluetooth was probably the one item that’s the bees knees for me with this update. Obex is not supported at this time, that I am aware of, and if I had to guess won’t be for sometime. This will probably one of the reasons to jailbreak the phone in the future, after I can asscertain that this build will be stable and won’t have patch updates in a couple of weeks.

Copy and paste worked like a charm, I ended up doing it without realizing it, since the notes were scrubbed, my password for the router was only stored on my computer and I had to boot into Linux. Typed in the password and tapped the number string in notes and the copy function came up.

Just found out, copy and paste does not seem to work with the facebook application.
MMS worked easily, both sending and recieving. Even the saving picture worked like a charm. SMS has a new feature that apart from texting in landscape, let’s you delete individual text messages, not something I need at the moment , but should be a huge hit with cheating spouses.

Spot light is one of the new applications that came out with 3.0 , unlike other applications, you don’t swipe to the left, but either to the right or the home button on the first page. Simply put, if it’s on your iPhone, spotlight will find it. As well as being an onboard search engine, it will also launch apps, so we are no longer limited to a certain amount of apps corresponding to pages.

That’s it for this installment, look here for more information as it becomes available.

Why is it that telco operators don’t get the big picture. I was reading today that Orange, a uk telco is threatening to pull its stock of N97 phones from their stores.

It seems Nokia has gone ahead and preloaded software for the skype voice over internet service, or voip for short. In line with other operators, orange has an irrational fear of becoming in their words just a dumb pipe.

Um, thats exactly what you are. Now my service is on Rogers Wireless, and currently the only application for voip is truphone, that little state of affairs has more to do with apple taking its own sweet time approving a skype application.

Simply switching the sim card to my backup phone, the sammy jack is a whole new ballgame with a standalone app that will make calls through the 3g network, who would have thought microsoft would have been so open.

The business person in me thinks that the two offending telcos are small players who believe that the voip service will impact their bottom line. The fact is that pulling the phones will impact them financially, in the short term with savvy consumers picking up unbranded phones, or jail breaking propriety systems if nokia relents and pulls the software.

In a way, im hoping that apple denies the skype app, they are already lining up to support the EFF in its suit with apple and i would have no problems getting the app from cydia.

While getting things the right way is desirable, I am not blind to the fact that sometimes you have to break the law or fight the system to redress a problem. Given the amount of users who have already jailbroke “their” phones, its apparent that “WE” have spoken.

Give us what we want through “YOUR” market place and make money, otherwise in the short term, we go with who ever does and look more carefully at the competition when the new phone cycle begins anew.

Its simple really