It was literally touch and go yesterday when Apple finally unleashed its iPhone 2.0 to the world… but not without glitches that at least for this particular user, lasted until early this morning.
No, I didn’t wait in line for the phone (nor am I planning to in this lifetime). Neither was I wondering why MobileMe kept coming and going even though it was “officially released” to the public. My qualms are all about software 2.0 and it’s availability. I mean, I could understand that the sheer demand of users for products and services may cause systems to go down at a certain point, but still offering links that doesn’t actually work isn’t really becoming of any company.
I did not try the unofficial link to the software update… I patiently waited until it was available on iTunes. My patience however didn’t bear much fruit since for several more hours, I was either greeted with the “unavailable” page or even worse, nothing at all.
Since the family was planning to go out in the afternoon, I decided to just be a little more patient and not think about it. My curiosity however has gotten strong when I saw a catalogue from one of the local mobile retailers. It was a weird experience too, which is deserves to be in a separate post.
I checked again once we got home and true enough, firmware 2.0 is finally available. I whipped out the touch, put it in its cradle and proceeded with the upgrade. The experience itself was ok, having to wait for the actual download and then both restoration of the iPod and installation of the new firmware did take a bit of time… which was alright since I had some other things to do anyway.
The best part was testing the new firmware as well as the apps that you can get on the AppStore. I have my favorites and a few that I took out as soon as I ran them, but I will go more into detail about the new apps tomorrow.