When 2.0.2 came out, I wrote a nice post about how iPhone firmware 2.0.2 sucks. Now 2.1 is out and let me tell you, it is fantastic. Let’s get started.

1) 3g reception is so much better.  The new baseband, v2. 11.07 comes with 2.1. The baseband is so much better. For the first time ever I can actually get 3g in my house! 2.0 came with 1.45.01 which was ok. 2.0.1 came with 1.48.02 and it was horrible. 2.0.2 came with 2.08 and it was much better (similar to 1.45). Now 2.11.07 is way better than any of the previous versions. This is a serous improvement.  Note: 2g reception is identical. The baseband on 2g did not update. No better, no worse on 2g.

2) Appstore Works! Apple finally solved the app mapping issue (sort of). I have been bitching about this problem since 2.0. Once you have a lot of apps or certain apps installed, AppStore becomes basically useless.  Many people have experienced a spinning wheel of death after installing an app because the iPhone Springboard mapping agent had to remap all the files on the iPhone everytime something was installed. This has been solved via a cache file. So new apps get added and the file does not need to be rebuilt everytime. The result: you can use your AppStore! And Cydia! Yay.

3) The lag is gone. Finally all the lag is gone! I can type an SMS and not be 20 letters ahead of the iPhone. Overall speed is equal to 1.1.4 again. Finally.

4) Sync time is fixed. While it used to take 30-120 minutes to backup my iPhone, now it doesn’t. Apple finally realized that my computer with an internet connection can also pull the files off appstore. Instead of backing up my files, it just remembers what I had installed and downloads it again in iTunes. This is how it should be. The backups are usable again.

5) Mail sync. For the first time, I restored my backups and the mail app did not crash. No need for “bossprefs: fix user dir permissions” this time around. It just works how it should.

Tags: 2.1, 2.1 fixes, FW 2.1