Good:
1. WAY FASTER – especially on cell data – I was trying to get my mail on the Edge network and it took forever – the 3G network and faster hardware make a huge difference.
2. Video camera – this thing takes awesome little videos – I can’t imagine why I would need a separate video camera ever again.
3. Did I say faster? With the same wi-fi connection Safari loads web pages much faster – it’s actually usable. Hallelujah!
4. A working compass… this is neat, however see below.

Bad:
1. Gets pretty warm when using it as a phone.
2. Still no turn-by-turn navigation program, even with a compass.
3. My old iPhone dock doesn’t work, nor do any of my case accessories – they changed the shape of the phone from 2g to 3g revisions – aargh. Fortunately my bluetooth headset paired easily.

Ugly:
1. Battery Life – don’t expect to use this phone heavily without toting around some sort of charger or extended-life battery accessory. The battery is actually worse than my 2-year old iPhone 2G. And yes, I disabled Push. I refuse to turn off 3G to save battery life – what a hassle.

Overall I’d say I’m very happy with it – the only real complaint being that I must strategize my use of it to conserve battery life – may get a car charger soon.

Of course I chose download and update, and of course after 45 minutes of updating the frickin’ phone was stuck on the update bar. So, I unplugged the phone (impatient!) and iTunes complained about abject failure. Anyway, long story short I did a restore and update and now it’s working fine.

1 quirk  -  the E doesn’t change to a Wifi icon when I am connected to WiFi (I have an original iPhone (not 3G).

Anyway, some new features, the biggest of which is system wide cut-and-paste.

Here’s a link to “16 Tips to Become an INSTANT iPhone OS 3.0 Power-User” – handy.

In in-depth review of the new firmware at ArsTechnica is here.

I’ve deployed a number of Apple Servers, and for Leopard (10.5) it took them until 10.5.5 to work out some bugs that would kill file sharing and require a reboot EVERY DAY. The Apple discussion forums were filled with posts about this – Apple never even posted a “We are working on this”. To this day, iCal server just plain sucks. It’s missing critical features that allow people to share events outside the organization, it requires end users to periodically remove their account from iCal and re-add it in order to start functioning again, and you can’t even edit calendar events on your iPhone. This is ridiculuous.

Anyway, I agree that a M$ solution can be expensive and isn’t for everyone. But let’s face it, Exchange is a mature, fully supported system that works seamlessly with the iPhone. I have never had a single problem with this combination with any of my clients. It works like its supposed to. The real competition is between Exchange and Google Apps as far as I’m concerned. Apple is not even a player in this space, and until they prove that they care about their enterprise users, I won’t deploy even one more Apple server.

‘nuf said.

Here’s the article:

Snow Leopard Server to offer low cost, secure mobile access to iPhone

Anyway, I wonder if Apple considers itself a defense contractor? Read on:

Apple’s New Weapon

http://theappleblog.com/2008/08/07/free-custom-iphone-ringtones-using-only-itunes/