iPod/iPhone 2.0

Well, I figured I’d better write a post. It’s been a little while!

I’ve been using the 2.0 firmware on my iPod touch now for a couple weeks. So far things have been going really smoothly. The enterprise WPA works beautifully at my university, although setup wasn’t that fun (instructions here). Stability at first was a bit of an issue. Some of the apps kept crashing (it was actually less stable than my jailbroken iPod). In fact, sometimes an app would freeze up and make my music skip.

Some of the apps are great, some are not. The Facebook app is pretty decent, at least now you can view people’s walls. The Lastfm app would be a lot better, however, Apple doesn’t allow background processes, so unfortunately it doesn’t support scrobbling. As expected, Super Monkey Ball delivers and is really great, but is also very challenging! A fun little game is JirboBreak, which is just a breakout clone. The NYTimes app is pretty good, although a bit unstable at times. Tap Tap Revenge is great, it’s like guitar hero type deal for the iPod/iPhone. There’s a wordpress app, which I haven’t had a chance to use yet, and the best is the Remote App. Remote lets you use your iPod/iPhone as a (ed:) [G.D.] flickerbox for iTunes, allowing you to browse your music and change the volume, scrub, and pause tracks. Very useful for parties.

Exchange support is here, however, I don’t (yet) have any use for it. One thing iPod touch users will like is the beeping on mail. As soon as it gets new mail, it’ll beep at you, alerting you of your new mail. It doesn’t seem to be as quick on the draw as before, and doesn’t always tell me if I have new mail. I’m not sure what the issue is, but I wish it would tell me every time!

Push notifications aren’t anything really interesting. Mail checking can only be set in 15 minute increments. Since all my accounts are IMAP, they only support fetch anyways. I’d rather have 5 minute increments for mail checking, but I guess 15 minutes is fine.

The only thing I want back from my jailbroken iPod was Lastfm scrobbling support. I’m hoping someone will find a way to make this work, but until then, I guess I’ll just have to live without it.