iPhone 2.0 Initial Reactions

The iPhone 3G was released today to much hype and excitement, but I have been looking forward to today for another reason: the iPhone 2.0 Software Update. It wasn’t as smooth a road as it could have been, but 2.0 is running on my phone and I’ve got to say it’s pretty awesome.

A year ago when I picked up the original iPhone it was pretty much the greatest personal computing device I’d ever laid eyes on, let alone owned. While it pretty much revolutionized the cell phone industry it had a few things that I grew to live with. The biggest flaw was that it only supported one calendar. On my computer I have iCal set up with three calendars: Home, Work, Birthdays, and Holidays. They all synced to my iPhone but were all considered to be one and the same. If I added an event to iPhone’s calendar it was added to the Home calendar. There was no way to mark it as a work event. Now, with iPhone 2.0, all calendars are supported! I mentioned this on Twitter earlier, and I’ll say it again now: the greatest feature of iPhone 2.0 is multiple calendar support. What can I say, it’s the little things that make me happy.

But there are other, more high profile features in iPhone 2.0 that excite me as well, namely the App Store. I’ve downloaded a few Apps and have found some great ones and some bad ones. Here’s what I think so far:

NetNewsWire
I use NetNewsWire on my Mac more than any other application (behind Safari and Mail). Yesterday when I found out there was an iPhone version, I had to give it a try. It only lasted about ten minutes before it was deleted. It’s got the worst UI I’ve seen, it’s not really fun to use and it makes reading feeds more or less a pain. They’ve got a long ways to go to match the desktop version’s functionality.

MLB At Bat
When Steve Jobs gave this years WWDC Keyonte and started to preview iPhone apps, there was one that caught my eye had be looking forward to it ever since. The momentous app in question was MLB At Bat. It’s a baseball fan’s dream: every game, play-by-play, and almost instantaneous highlight clips. The UI is great and the video quality is ridiculous. There are so many clips per game, it’s like having ESPN in your pocket (MLB can use that if they can get around the trademark issues). This app is top notch.

Twitterrific
The final app I’m going to look at tonight is Twitterrific. Like NetNewsWire, Twitterrific is the iPhone version of it’s desktop counterpart, but unlike NetNewsWire the iPhone version has the desktop version beat. While on my Mac I prefer using Twitter’s web interface to any of the tweet applications I’ve tried though on the iPhone I have been a fan of the web-interface Hahlo for it’s simplicity and UI. Though when the App Store launched I figured I’d give the native Twitterrific a try. Twitterrific might be the best app in the entire store. It comes in two flavors: free and premium (no ads just like the desktop version). I run the free version because the ads (from The Deck) aren’t that bad. Twitterrific (it’s really hard to type this word over and over again) has the best UI I’ve seen from an application, iPhone or otherwise, in a long time. It’s simple to use, looks great, and makes Twitter a breeze to use. Sorry to say it, but Hahlo and I are dunzo.

There you have it, my initial reactions on iPhone 2.0. There are a bunch more apps and a lot more features but these are the highlights that I thought were worth sharing. Oh, and all the screen shots were taken with the new iPhone screen shot feature (hold the home button and then hit the lock button) and then uploaded to MobileMe — the other great thing that came with iPhone 2.0 but I’ll save that for another day.