Well, I have to play the cliché game again. You see, three times may indeed have been the charm for Apple’s efforts to repair the most irritating bugs in the current generation of iPhone software.

The misery for Apple began on that fateful day when they tried to achieve three holes in one, simultaneously introducing the iPhone 3G, the new 2.0 software, and reinventing .Mac as MobileMe.

In retrospect, I would call it one home run and two outs. Yes, there were some activation issues early on for the first few hours the highly-anticipated iPhone 3G went on sale. Perhaps that was a combination of the overload experienced by both Apple’s and AT&T’s servers in the states, and similar issues around the world where the hot-selling gadget first went on sale.

Regardless, lots of iPhone users complained, and quite loudly. They reported a litany of problems, including application crashes, excessive numbers of dropped calls, poor broadband speeds, and slow user interface response, particularly when checking your contact list. A few pundits suggested the software reeked of beta, even though it was supposedly a final release.

The 2.0.1 and 2.0.2 updates, offering “bug fixes,” evidently failed to resolve the most serious issues. The latter supposedly addressed 3G connectivity issues with wireless phone networks, but results proved to be a mixed bag.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

This article was posted on Sunday, September 14th, 2008 at 6:30 PM and is filed under News and tagged with: Apple, cable, Cox, DirecTV, Dish Network, Firmware, Gadget, Iphone, iPhone 2.0, Live Radio, Mac, Mac Notebooks, Neighborhood, New Ipod, New Product Introductions, Night Owl, Phoenix, Qwest, reception, Retrospect, satellite, software.