LaslowNET

Sometimes there’s an advantage to only having one 3G carrier in Canada – when the OS 3.0 upgrade came out for the iPhone, I upgraded my 3G immediately without having to worry about waiting for the unlock to come out. Instead, I just waited for the Pwnage Tool (as I have access to a Mac at work, otherwise I would have had to wait slightly longer for RedSn0w) without my jail break for a few days.

So now that it’s been (nearly) a week, and I’ve had a chance to play around with the new OS with and without third-party mods, I’ve been able to come up with a few conclusions as to whether or not Apple is heading in the right direction. And, for your reading pleasure, I’ve put them in list form.

The OS 3.0 Features Themselves

• Cut/Copy/Paste: Overall, it’s handy when you need it. I find that when I go to move the cursor around when I’m correcting a typo (of which I tend to make many), the little pop CCP pop-up often comes up right away, beckoning me to select something, as if it’s saying ‘You bitched about me not being here since you got the phone, now use me dammit!’. Unfortunately, I don’t find myself using it anywhere near as much as I thought I would. So far it’s been to dump things in to Tweets on Twitterrific, and that’s about it.
• MMS: I rarely text anyone – my wife, occasionally, when we’re both out of the house and in different places, and maybe a friend here and there if I can’t reach them on Live Messenger/IRC/Twitter/Phone/etc…. In fact, Twitter has nearly completely replaced texting for me, and I really can’t ever see myself using MMS as most people I know don’t have phones that support it, so they just get a link from their carrier with a URL to go to find the picture. That said, I may as well just send then that anyways. Or Tweet it.
• Tethering: Rogers, the iPhone carrier in Canada, decided that you can tether your iPhone at no extra cost if you’re paying for a data plan that’s 1GB/month or higher. I happen to be on the 1GB plan (although I rarely use even 500MB, my wireless router at home and work saving me from the rather slow 3G network), so I tried it out on my Acer Aspire One. The verdict? Well, it’s about as fast as you’d expect, which is to say, not very at all. However, if I manage to find myself in an area without free WiFi or at least free wired internet, and 3G service is available, it would be worth doing. For now, like MMS, it’s turned off.
• Scrolling: I’m happy to report that scrolling is ever-so-slightly smoother in OS 3.0. Not much, and no where near as smooth as the 3G s apparently is, but it’s a noticeable difference.
• Safari: The upgrade Safari received almost makes the 3.0 upgrade worth it just by itself. It opens and runs faster, and the best part of all, it hasn’t crashed on me at all since I upgraded. Not once! Of course, I tried to crash it – I opened Slashdot, Arstechnica, Digg, FMyLife, Twitter, the Dev-Team Blog, Wikipedia, and a page that I put up on the backend of this server specifically designed to put load on the browser. Safari handled it all with ease.
• Flash: By far the best feature of the upgrade! I can actually get the full browsing experience most sites offer, and don’t have to look at that stupid questioning block anymore!…..is what I’d be saying, if Apple had actually pulled their heads out of their collective asses and actually included support for it. Then again, most all-flash sites are garbage anyways, so I’m actually not missing that much….
• Spotlight Search: It’s last for a reason. I honestly don’t have enough stuff on my phone to warrant searching for anything. My contact list only has around fifty people on it, I use the Mail.app only while I’m away from work, and then I clean it out after I’ve read each message, and the notes that I take are one-off’s 99% of the time. In fact, the only time I generally use it is when I’m trying to scroll to the first page of the Springboard and accidentally go a page too far to the left. Whoops.

Jail Breaking

• Cydia: Oh my. For the first few days after jail breaking, Cydia was hell. I actually re-installed Icy because it was just that bad. The constant crashing nearly drove me insane, but the worst part was how slow it was. The main page would take minutes to load, and then when I’d try to navigate through categories, it would take upwards of 10 seconds for it to acknowledge that I’d clicked anything. Then saurik (the app’s author) discovered that Javascript debugging had be left on and released a update to turn it off. After that, everything was right-as-rain.
• Icy: Still sucks. Badly. Although it launches faster than Cydia, it takes forever to refresh the sources list, and (now that the Javascript-debugging thing has been sorted) responds slower than Cydia while browsing categories. And maybe I’m just too used to Cydia, but I can’t stand the package layout of Icy (little differences, like how it shows already installed packages in the Categories view when Cydia doesn’t). In my option, skip Icy – there’s a reason why the Dev-Team includes Cydia by default in the Pwnage Tool and RedSn0w.
• BossPrefs: I installed it, tried to tweak a few settings, then removed it. The problem? I tried to disable the numeric battery. That worked. Then I tried to enable it again. That didn’t. Then I rebooted – very bad idea. Normal Pwnapple loading screen, then to my surprise, the Apple loading screen with a progress bar. Shit. Get to the Springboard and find a hint about arranging icons, and everything back to defaults. Apparently it fucked up the Springboard settings (probably changed a Plist in a way that 3.0 didn’t like) and reset everything.
• SBSettings: Pre-3.0, I’d always used BossPrefs because SBSettings seemed to constantly crash other apps (whether because of a bug in the release version I was using or due to the increased memory usage, I don’t know). However, the SBSettings released for OS 3.0 works beautifully, and there’s even a skin for it to match the Winterboard theme I use.
• Mobile Terminal: Still really handy when I need a command prompt to nmap something or ping something else, however it’s got an odd bug right now that causes it to flip upside down on launch, so you have to turn the phone upside down to match. Very, very strange.

In summary, the OS 3.0 update is definitely worthwhile, however be aware that until app authors start pumping out compatibility updates, especially in regard to apps that require the jail break, you’re likely to run in to a few issues along the way.