Brief iPhone 2.2 notes
I jailbroke my iPhone last week to see what was happening in the homebrew scene. Not all that much, really, so I upgraded to the official 2.2 this morning. Both times I’ve jailbroken (2.1 and 1.1.3), my iPhone has suffered from significantly degraded performance and stability.
One of the features of 2.2 I haven’t seen detailed anywhere else is the display of street blocks, e.g if you look at 1st and Washington in Seattle, it will show you that it’s in the 200s. Street view is nice, but super slow on EDGE. It’s a little hard to get in to - you have to drop a pin, then press an icon of a head and torso. Existing pins which you’ve dropped have the icon, but it’s not active, which is strange.
I like the stop/reload button redesign in Safari. I don’t like the search field eating up space in my location bar at all. I wish I could completely disable it.
Podcast downloads are fantastic. I didn’t realize that they started playing as soon as they’d buffered. I haven’t tried it on EDGE yet. It should be okay for audio podcasts. I doubt any video podcasts are usable on EDGE.
The home shortcut is wonderful.
One continued absence is the ability to play only the audio portion of video podcasts. I loved this feature. Video podcasts appear in two places – Videos and Podcasts. If you start playing from Videos, you get the video. If you play from Podcasts, it’s audio only. This was perfect for me; my commute is around 45 minutes via bus and 15 minutes on bicycle. So I could watch most of an hour long podcast on the bus, then switch to the audio for the bike ride. This was present in the 5/5.5G iPods, and in the iPhone up to v2.0. Since Apple added vertical-format video playback in v2.1, it doesn’t work. If you lock the phone while the video is playing, the audio stops, too. I really wish they’d add this back.