Anand Reviews the Apple iPhone 3G

Other 2.0 Firmware Features

Other than the App Store, there are a number of other features enabled by the 2.0 firmware including better support for Exchange servers (which I’ll talk about shortly) and the ability to search through your contacts.

If you have thousands of contacts, the iPhone’s quick scrolling may not be enough to find the ones you want - but with most of my work contacts shifting jobs or leaving the industry fairly regularly, my address book just isn’t that big. That being said, there are others that may appreciate the contact search more than me - it’s nice, just not what I really wanted.

What I really wanted was the ability to search emails. I’m constantly emailing myself addresses, recipes (I have been known to wield a mean spatula) and other random things that I want quick access to. The problem is that even with a dedicated email account for personal stuff, it quickly gets lost on the iPhone. For the company that made Spotlight such a big feature of OS X, it’s honestly unacceptable that the iPhone still lacks email search support. It may sound like I’m being too harsh on Apple, but climb to the top and expectations rise with you.

That's nice. Wait, what? You still can’t search emails? Silly.

You can now save images from web pages you browse to by simply touching and holding your finger over the image - it will be added to your camera roll.

You can also now take screenshots, just hold down the Home button and hit the power button.

The new Calculator in 2.0

There’s also an option to import contacts from your SIM card into your address book, which seems like it’s something that would help if you happened to have an older SIM card that you were trying to migrate over to your iPhone. Since all iPhones ship with a new SIM card I’m guessing you’d have to import the contacts then swap SIM cards

The new firmware does seem to make things slower. I find that selecting items, launching certain applications and even accessing my contacts is slower than it used to be on the pre-2.0 firmware (even comparing the original iPhone to itself). Obviously there’s a lot more going on now, but it’s unclear how much additional performance tweaking can be done and how CPU bound we are at this point.