iPhone 3.0 Beta Review….So Far

First of all, thanks to the guys over at Single Grain for hooking me up with a beta license of 3.0

Pros:

• Spotlight – it’s about time that Apple included this. Not having the ability to search my contacts, mail, SMS, ipod etc. was a bear to deal with and it’s finally available. Works great!
• Copy/Paste – I cannot believe that Apple waited this long to include copy/paste. Now that I’ve played with it I think it rocks. It’s very easy to use and works well in all apps.
• A2DP Stereo Bluetooth – I had this working with my Sony deck in my car. Loved that I didn’t have to have yet another cord plugged in to my phone. The audio quality was great. It is a battery hog but the only time I’d use it is in my car when it’s plugged in to the cigarette lighter anyway.

There are all kinds of Pros I could list but I won’t bore you with them…you’ve all seen the article listing these. Let’s get to the bad…

Cons:

• Buggy – I’m not going to complain about this one too much because it’s beta software and to be expected. Luckily Apple is smarter than Verizon/Blackberry and won’t release software that isn’t ready for primetime (i.e the Crackberry Storm release…and yes I can talk trash about this because I owned one…and wanted to throw it off my roof.) Anyway, it’s slow overall. The apps don’t open quickly. I had to restart it multiple times, blah blah blah. They did just release a beta update yesterday though and I heard that it corrected many of these quirks.
• Week View in Calendar – Seriously Apple…why can’t I turn my phone into landscape view and see a week of my upcoming appointments?? This needs to be addressed!
• MMS – I couldn’t get MMS to work. I’ll cut Apple some slack here, this one is AT&T’s fault. Supposedly it will be up and running by the official release.
• To Do Syncing – Why can I not sync my to do list? I don’t want to add another app to do something that the calendar app should do.

Conclusion:

I am WAY pumped about the official release of 3.0 There were some major hang ups with me in getting an iPhone and Apple will solve most of these with the 3.0 release. However, the beta software is not ready for primetime yet and I reverted back to 2.2.1. It was a bear to try to get back, but don’t let people tell you it’s not possible because it is…it’s just an in depth process. Thanks to Noel H . for hooking me up with a link that walks you through it. I had to revert to running VMware Fusion and Windows XP to go back (was not happy about that.)