The other day I saw a tweet from Stephen Fry saying he was enjoying using the iPhone 3.0 beta update with his iPhone. I tweeted in reply asking where I could get it. I got a tweet back from @tapthatapp pointing me to a page that explained the what, where and how of trying out the beta version 3.0. Check out these pages before you start doing anything.
The first thing I discovered was "Rapidshare" is anything but rapid. Unless you pay them at least a per diem charge, you getabout 15kbps....which is a slow go for 250MB of data. So downloaded from the free direct links at about 60kbps. Much better.
To upgrade an iPod Touch or iPhone, you restore the contents of the downloaded IPSW file onto the device via iTunes. This wipes out whatever was there, but don't worry too much, as I'll explain later. In order to ensure the device remains usable with iTunes (and isn't effectively orphaned forever from the Apple eco-system), you must also subscribe - directly or indirectly - to the developers program. The direct cost is US$100. I went instead for the indirect option, offered by Jarrad Hall, of US$5 and provided the UDID of my device and waited.
It took Jarrad just over a day to inform me I was ready to go and that my iPod Touch would be usable with iTunes. My first attempt to restore the update to my iPod Touch didn't work, with iTunes telling me my firmware level was wrong. I asked Jarrad via email if he could help and he quickly replied, saying I should re-download the IPSW from his web page rather than the one at the original link. I think the original link may have had me downloading the iPhone version even though I had clicked on the iPod Touch 2gen link, as the first download had a different name to the second one.
Whatever, the second attempt worked and beta 3.0 IPSW installed flawlessly. On syncing, it also installed all my existing applications and copied over my playlists. My apps, music and videos were quickly as they had been before.
The beta is clearly a beta. I have had some issues, some of them serious but oddly enough, none of them have been reproducable. Here is a short list:
- Power funkiness. A couple of times the iPod Touch has gone into suspend mode - sort of. The icons are still visible, but dimmed. I had to hold the top power-off button for 6 seconds to effectively force a re-boot. I can't reproduce this.
- Safari sometimes won't rotate the page to landscape. If I Home-button out of safari and go back in, it will them rotate the loaded page. I can't make this happen on demand, but this is how I get out of it when it occurs.
- Twitellater 2.0 couldn't open any web links on one occasion - either directly in Twitellater or externally in Safari (a settable option). Powering off the iPod Touch appeared to sor this out. I can't reproduce the behaviour.
- The worst problem by far occured last evening when I tried to copy / paste a URL from Safari into Twitellator. The paste didn't happen, but after the attempt almost every app started crashed immediately. Only a handful would run (Contacts, App Store and a couple of others). Powering off and on repeatedly made no difference. Everything else just went splat immediately. The device was all but unusable. After 90 minutes of playing around trying to get it to work properly - and failing - I thought I was going to have to restore back to v2.2.1. In preparing for that, I sync'd the iPod Touch with iTunes. Happily, following the sync, the iPod Touch resumed normal function. Everything worked again. I tried to reproduce the event by doing the same copy / paste operation and could not reproduce it. Copy / paste worked fine. The only difference may have been the use of the app Free Memory the first time around, several minutes before I attempted the copy / paste. Free Memory may no longer be compatible with v3.0. That would be no real surprise. I probably shouldn't have tried using it in the first place.
Update: 10 minutes after posting the article above. I pulled my iPod Touch out of my pocket and it is lights-out. Dark and unresponsive. For the moment.....dead. I'll see if I can revive it.
Update 2: Googled and found this site explaining how to re-boot a frozen iPod Touch. Following these instructions, my iPod Touch re-booted after holding both buttons for about 45 ....long.... seconds.
Update 3: After almost 3 weeks on the 3.0 beta, I went back to using v2.2.1. The added function of the beta wasn't worth the continued instability of the beta and the failure of many or my apps to run at all.......sometimes. I couldn't work out how to make most of the bug repeatable, either, so work-arounds weren't possible as the behaviour was unpredictable. I suspect lots of memory leaks, which would be fatal in a device with 128MB of system RAM and no ability to swap to virtual memory when the real thing runs out. I'll wait for the final release of v3.0.
